THE FILM
TITLE: Wicked Little Letters
RELEASE DATE: 09 Sep 2023, Toronto International Film Festival
WATCH DATE: 10 Apr 2024
TYPE: live-action feature film
ACCESS: movie theatre, AMC A-List membership
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THE PEOPLE
DIRECTOR: Thea Sharrock
PRODUCER: Olivia Colman, Ed Sinclair, Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin, Anna Hintzen, Jo Wallett
WRITER: Jonny Sweet
ACTORS: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Joanna Scanlan, Gemma Jones, Malachi Kirby, Lolly Adefope, Eileen Atkins, Timothy Spall, Hugh Skinner
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THE STORY
RUNTIME: 1h 40m
STORYLINE: In the 1920s, Edith Swan, a proper English woman, becomes the recipient of a strange and obscene series of letters, and when her blunt Scottish neighbor Rose Gooding gets wrongly accused of sending them, it falls to ‘woman police officer’ Moss and Gooding’s community to expose the real culprit
GENRE/THEMES: dark comedy, situational comedy, mystery, drama, crime, women
Based on a True Scandal
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THE CRITIQUE
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Scandalously entertaining.
A dramedy-mystery based on true events, Wicked Little Letters is situationally comedic and shockingly believable. Funny moments throughout are balanced by serious implications for Rose’s life. There is a sense of classic British comedy contrasted with the obscene letters of the crime. Wicked Little Letters is a perfect example of a good use of foul language. So many films are wrought with it (6 Underground, didn’t get past 10 minutes), and it’s simply unnecessary. Here, the language serves a purpose and the outrageous circumstances put it in the light of comedy. It’s also clearly not the film's focus and therefore isn’t overwhelming or jarring. Well done to Jonny Sweet for a great script.
The ‘who-wrote-it’ mystery is revealed about halfway through, so the rest of the film is dedicated to Rose, Officer Moss, and their community catching the culprit with a heist-like energy. The midway reveal could have been - and should have been significantly more dramatic. More dramatic scoring for the scene, more exciting cinematography. For the first third of the film, we believe the protagonist to be Edith, and we’re unsure of the antagonist, but it could be Rose. The reveal suddenly swaps those roles and keeps us on our toes.
Colman is precisely wicked. She is a powerhouse and leaves no ounce of her skill on the table for this role. She plays the prim-and-proper woman, the manipulated spinster daughter, and the foul-mouthed writer with believability. Let’s cast her in all the films.
Spall brings every ounce of unpleasantry to his role as Edith’s passive-aggressive and verbally abusive father. The script reveals this gradually and as the story unfolds, we see how atrocious the Swan family dynamic is. The success of his performance is vital in understanding Edith’s lifetime of such poor treatment from her father that has driven her to such bipolar behavior. Every scene with the Swam family is one more layer of the disgusting onion peeled back to reveal Edith’s motive and inner conflict.
Buckley is spirited as Rose Gooding. We all want to be her friend. She embodies the loveable protagonist with her own flaws. Her smile is warm and mischievous.
I felt there was a HUGE loss of potential with the typography and graphics, during the opening titles and exposition and the closing. The first scene shows the subtitle “The 19th Letter” in the same handwritten typeface as the title card, and I was looking forward to more of this. This is the type of story that lends itself to such design, and they could have pushed the creativity of this aspect of the film.
Wicked Little Letters is a triumph for women. These are the types of stories that ought to be shared to empower women: a group of everyday women fighting for the justice of another - including a ‘woman police officer’ who goes against her male superiors to investigate this case.
A note to filmmakers: let’s find more of these true stories to adapt into the next film! We need more of this humanity! Don’t let the obscurity of this film keep you from seeing it before it leaves theaters!
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THE RECEPTION
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THE IMPRESSION
IN A SINGLE WORD: scandalously entertaining
MOST STRIKING ELEMENT: acting
REWATCH: yes
RATING: 3.5 // 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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