Wicked Little Letters: Your Grandparents New Guilty Pleasure

Wicked Little Letters is the type of pre-watershed raunchy material that your grandparents would let stay on, despite the constant expletives, mentions of ‘fannies’ and ‘foxy asses’. A movie that would have your granddad telling stories of the times when he would flood schools, or talk to his girlfriends about inappropriate things, chuckling away thinking about how much times have changed. In other words, it’s perfect background work for a Sunday roast. The majority of the 100-minute runtime is spent watching older British women go pale, as a snappy Jessie Buckley yells about their ugly faces, using any amount of creatively lewd similes she can muster. That charm does wear off quickly, though, especially when each member of the stellar cast is permanently dialled to 100, non-stop screaming. It’s only thanks to a heavy reliance on good-ol’ hearty British melodrama in the second half that Thea Sharrock’s latest scrapes across the finish line.

This is the kind of true story of Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), a lovely Christian woman who serves her parents dutifully in post-WW1 Britain, and starts to receive strange, depraved letters that her father, Edward Swan (Timothy Spall), assumes are coming from the next-door neighbour, a rowdy Irish woman named Rose Gooding (Buckley). Edward hasn’t liked Rose since she moved in, what with her ‘liberal’ ideals and wants for strange things like ‘bodily autonomy’ and ‘the ability to swear’, so he stopped his daughter from being friends with her. These are the types of broad, caricaturish feminist issues the movie fights with: an old man staring down at his newspaper and asking the only policewoman in town, Gladyss Moss (Anjana Vasan), if she can believe the craziness of the women’s suffrage movement. Another point for this being your grandparents’s new favourite movie, Johnny Sweet’s script is fighting the ghosts of their generation. Not surprisingly, the film refuses to indulge in racial politics, even though that would likely make for better-realised melodrama. It’s hard to believe a pensioner in 1920 would have more of an issue with the white women around him than he does with the black man living next door or the Indian woman who is policing him.

Who is actually sending the letters will be evident to any veteran Sherlock watchers from the start, but it’s made blatantly clear to everyone about half an hour before the actual reveal, so we have to coast by as if we’re dumbfounded. Luckily, everyone is hamming it up and having a great time while doing it. Colman’s doing great work on her run of recent characters who are easy to hate/love at the same time; this is no different. She’s almost playing a schoolgirl type here, who is deathly afraid of her dictatorial father, quivering anytime he says anything, and rowdy when he’s out of sight. Jessie Buckley is two more English comedies away from being a primetime national treasure (maybe more if we can’t forget about Men). Here, she has to do most of the emotional and comedic heavy lifting, which she manages with a few hiccups here and there. The throughline with her daughter really balances the movie out and helps carry it through the rocky ending portion, where everything is getting a little tired. Anjana Vasan surprises, even though she’s given an utterly thankless role, and the rest of the side cast do great too, especially Ann, who loves eggs just as much as is normal.

Despite it not being as tight or as funny as the cast promises, Wicked Little Letters won me over in the end by virtue of its sheer simplicity. I haven’t seen a comedy this aggressively British in a long time, nor have I seen one as loud and overtly annoying by the end. The perfect iPlayer movie.