Based on a true story of anonymous hate-mail, Wicked Little Letters maps perfectly onto stories of harassment in the online era. However, this metaphor is one of the only things the 1920s period comedy has going for it. The other is its lead performance by Olivia Colman, who — much like her role in Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light — ends up skillfully carrying a film that otherwise has little energy, whimsy, or meaning of its own.
Colman plays Edith Swan, a respected religious woman in the seaside parish of Littlehampton. She lives with her elderly parents, the snippy Edward (Timothy Spall) and the sensitive Victoria (Gemma Jones), whose family dinners now play host to local policemen, to whom they complain about nasty anonymous letters sent to their address. The Swans pearl-clutch, in amusing fashion, over the clunky expletives (like “foxy ass” and “stinky bitch”), and they have one key suspect in mind: their foul-mouthed Irish immigrant neighbor, Rose Goodling (Jessie Buckley), a single mother with a promiscuous reputation.
Right away, director Thea Sharrock establishes her movie’s moral binary, as conservative Christians like the Swans begin casting aspersions on Rose for her perceived moral transgressions. However, the only thing of which she appears to be guilty is flaunting society’s gendered norms, leading to a novice police officer, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) — the first and only woman on the force — coming to her defense.
At first, Edith twists these ethical dimensions in interesting ways, negotiating between Biblical notions of “love thy neighbor” and Old Testament-style vengeance. It’s incredibly funny to watch Colman wrestle with these dueling ideas. However, this undercurrent extends beyond the first few scenes, leaving its story to travel along a straight and narrow trajectory, which leaves even its lone plot twist feeling like an inevitability.
Wicked Little Letters’ mystery is rarely mysterious — it presents few alternatives to Rose for the us to consider, en route to its reveal — and much of its comedy ends up just as flat. Were it not for the empty spaces and lingering reaction shots after numerous punchlines (where a sitcom might insert canned laughter), it’s often hard to tell what’s a joke and what’s straightforward drama. Granted, comedy is even more subjective than most art forms, but even the filmmaking in Wicked Little Letters feels ill-suited for the genre. It lacks verse and mischief in its camera movements, whether capturing the characters zipping from place to place, or peeking around walls as they try to sleuth out the real culprit. Its editing seldom punctuates the humor, leaving most exchanges hovering uncomfortably in mid-air. Each scene feels like it’s sucking the energy out of the room.
Its central idea of anonymous letters revealing a quaint town’s dark underbelly has loads of potential. This is especially true when we see Edith begin to step outside her own moral boundaries and give into the temptation of dirty language — Colman is an utter delight as a woman brushing quietly up against social constraints — but Wicked Little Letters also talks around much of the subject matter. One can intuit that Rose’s Irish-ness is a sticking point for some English characters, who make roundabout mention of “where [she’s] from,” though there’s little sense of the actual sentiments, whether political, religious or racial, that inform their suspicions, even behind closed doors.
Stranger yet, albeit in a similar way, is the casting of Vasan as “Woman Police Officer” Moss, whose gender is often centered in conversations — setting up a story of an underestimated woman showing up her male counterparts — but whose race never seems to come up directly. Vasan is Indian-born, but appears to have been cast without consideration for her ethnicity in a role written for a white woman, and without the script being edited to accommodate this change.
The setting coincides with Britain’s rule over India, and through Vasan’s presence, the specter of colonial racism hovers over the story – whether Sharrock or screenwriter Jonny Sweet intend this or not. It brings to mind Danny Boyle’s Beatles-amnesia-fantasy Yesterday, in which Himesh Patel was cast in similarly race-blind fashion, but without key lines being adjusted to account for how they might play with a South Asian actor in the role. In one instance, Moss is called “smelly,” which carries particular racial connotations that no character, including Moss herself, seems to acknowledge. Other police officers bring up her former-policeman father and how she doesn’t belong on the force, though their objections are only ever limited to her femininity, which, like Rose’s Irish identity, is stripped of all racial and political connotations.
Wicked Little Letters needn’t be a screed against racism in order to work, but it leaves valuable comedic and dramatic material on the table by ignoring these in-your-face dimensions to its own story. Between this void of meaning at its center, and the complete lack of dynamism in its filmmaking, it’s left to rely only on Buckley, Vasan, and Colman’s reaction shots to each line and scenario, which imbue it with some semblance of intrigue. Buckley is fiercely committed as a woman wronged by her neighbors, while Vasan maintains poise and resolve in the face of professional limitations (placed on her by male superiors who don’t think she’s up to the task).
However, Colman is most responsible for the few moments Wicked Little Letters feels vivid and alive. They may be few and far between, but they arrive in the form of silent introspection and withheld moments that convey far more than the dialogue ever could, and certainly more than this style of function-first filmmaking ever does. The camera seeks to capture dialogue delivery first and foremost, but Colman ensures that action, and more importantly thought, are the most alluring elements of a given scene.
Unfortunately, even an actress as accomplished as Colman can only do so much, when a film is this lacking in enthusiasm for its own material.
