'Wicked Little Letters' is Playfully Uninteresting & Likes It That Way

Move over Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain; there’s a British version of Mother’s Instinct’s period drama “Mother-off” – with equally beloved national treasures Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman. Even better, they’re swearing the whole gosh-flipping time; Wicked Little Letters tells the surprising story of the Littlehampton “poison pen letters,” where a spinster suspects her poorer neighbor of anonymously sending vulgar and aggressive hate mail in 1920s Sussex. In the film, Edith Swan (Colman), a strictly religious live-at-home daughter of the overbearing conservative Edward (Timothy Spall), is instrumental in accusing her crass Irish immigrant neighbor Rose Gooding (Buckley) of sending the libelous and harassive post. As prejudice leads the police investigation towards injustice, it’s down to Women Police Officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) to unveil the true culprit.

Wicked Little Letters riffs on the modern-day phenomenon of online hate mail, where death threats and abusive messages can be sent with little consequence to public figures, reflected in the marketing tagline “Be careful what you post.” But the film’s modern-day resonance still comes from a real story, with characters based closely on real people – as the movie tells us as it starts, more of it is true than we’d think.

All the talent seems lined up for a bubbly and charming romp, but Wicked Little Letters feels like it’s been made in a sterile British comedy-drama lab. Yes, the film is full of cursing, with F-words and C-words dropped at hysterical rates, but it’s not precisely provocative on a cerebral level. When foul-mouthed Rose (it’s nice that Buckley gets to use her native Irish accent) speaks in a near-constant barrage of effing and jeffing, there’s the sense that the ideal audience member will find this all titillating rather than challenging or upsetting – as in, there’s no expectation that anyone’s going to be shocked. After all, it’s a period drama – people didn’t swear back then!