Wicked Little Letters Should’ve Been for the Sickos

For the most part, Wicked Little Letters is a serviceable trifle. It’s a bouncy English countryside jaunt that would be perfect as a weekend PBS movie — if it weren’t for the sexually graphic profanity driving the plot, of course. This is more critique than praise, because the film wastes the very clear assets it has, including a premise bursting with possibility and a cast headlined by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. Indeed, hiding somewhere in this seaside caper is a genuinely interesting psychosexual drama, buried beneath suffocating layers of treacly comedy.

Set a few years after the first World War, the film follows the scandalized goings-on in Littlehampton, a coastal British village, after a number of residents start receiving poison pen letters from an anonymous sender. Paradoxically handwritten with flowery penmanship, the missives are prodigious in their vulgarity and often aggressively sexual in nature: “Her Majesty Ms. Swan sucks ten cocks a week minimum.” “Dear Gladys, thank God your dad got shot, you smelly bitch,” so on and so forth. The story opens on an especially targeted recipient of the pornographic postage: the aforementioned Swan, first name Edith (Colman), a pious spinster who still lives with her domineering father (Timothy Spall) and timid mother (Gemma Jones). Mores of the time are such that the letters constitute criminal conduct beyond simple harassment. Shocked and bothered, the Swans call in the police, and through Edith’s quiet suggestion, suspicion and blame begins to fall on their neighbor, Rose Gooding (Buckley), an Irish immigrant and single mother whose free-spirited nature has already drawn wary looks from the town’s genteel population. Gooding is promptly jailed for the offense, and as she awaits trial, a chase to find the truth ensues.

The film is broadly based on a real-life scandal, dubbed the “Littlehampton Libels,” that commanded national attention and even resulted in several courtroom dustups during its time. (Edith Swan and Rose Gooding were real people, and at least some of what happens is based on actual events.) It was most recently written about in a 2017 book by the academic Christopher Hilliard, who explored the incident through the relationship between Britain’s controlling obsession with manners and its lowly perception of women. Wicked Little Letters fixates on those sociological themes, laboring to construct a setting where dumb, misogynistic men run rampant and women are persistently placed in subservient positions. But in the hands of director Thea Sharrock (Me Before You, The One and Only Ivan), who works off a script by Jonny Sweet, those ideas are presented with the thundering nuance of a sledgehammer.

The film also shares a sledgehammer’s reductive nature. Just about every aspect of this scandal is interpreted through the lens of gender, much to the detriment of the story’s other layers. The Littlehampton of Wicked Little Letters is one of those jewel-box worlds populated by color-blind casting in a way that ends up working against the film’s intended social critique. Case in point: a female police officer named Gladys Moss, who doubts the blame on Gooding and endeavors to solve the central mystery. Moss is played by Anjana Vasan (We Are Lady Parts), a British Singaporean actress of Tamil origin whose face and background draw to mind the country’s history as a colonial empire. The story of this poison-pen scandal is, in part, about the decline of a historical British way of life and social structure that had been tied up with the country’s sense of self as an imperial power. With this in mind, there’s an inherent symbolism baked into Vasan appearing in a period piece like this, but alas, the film does nothing with this choice. In Wicked Little Letters, Moss is completely defined by her womanhood, a fact that ultimately sands down all the racial power associated with placing Vasan in this role.

It would’ve been easy to write Wicked Little Letters off as purely forgettable if it weren’t for one particular thread. Unfortunately, you can’t really talk about it without spoiling the (exceedingly obvious) twist. Halfway through the film, we learn that the anonymous writer of those poison pen letters is in fact Edith herself, and the scene communicating this plays to the very best aspects of Colman’s face. Her eyes brighten and enlarge with forbidden delight as she scribbles out another profane letter, her singsong voice reading aloud its filthy contents. Suddenly, an utterly fascinating figure emerges: Edith Swan as a middle-age woman who ultimately finds power and release — after being suffocated by religion and the patriarchy for much of her life — in the production of violent, obscene, sexually charged words. It’s such an interesting idea, and it adds great texture to the character: a woman who weaponizes what little she can against another woman of lower class. This is why you bring in Colman, whose most potent weapon as a performer is conjuring the look of someone barely controlling volcanic swells of emotion. For one glorious scene, I was convinced I was watching a movie with more on its mind. But the moment quickly dissipates, and as the story barrels through its formulaic final act, I, too, start to feel the stifling constraints of British manners. Wicked Little Letters delights in its naughtiness, but it really should’ve embraced its perversion.