Olivia Colman Is a National Treasure

In the quiet little English hamlet of Littlehampton, someone has been sending out anonymous letters to their fellow townsfolk. Not just any types of greetings or wish-you-were-here correspondence circa the early 1920s, mind you. These unsigned missives say things like, “You foxy-ass old whore,” or “You dirty old bitch, you belong in hell, probably,” and “You suck 10 cocks a week, minimum.” These are some of the tamer ones, mind you. This epidemic of epistolary obscenities first began to show up at the door of one Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), a pious Christian woman who lives with her parents down the lane. Soon, everyone in town is receiving them, and a national furor erupts. Who is behind these poison-pen poems of profanity? Why are they doing this? And even keeping in mind that the slang of 100 years ago might give modern ears pause — what’s the deal with “foxy-ass?!”

The main suspect is Edith’s next-door neighbor, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). An Irish widow whose husband was killed in the trenches during WWI, she’s relocated to Littlehampton with her daughter (Alisha Weir). And according to the authorities, she fits the profile of someone who’d terrorize a good Christian citizen like Edith. For starters, this earthy young lady spices her everyday sentences with the saltiest of language. She lives a bohemian life with her boyfriend, a jazz guitarist named Bill (Malachi Kirby). Rose recently had a row with Edith and her Freudian nightmare of a father (Timothy Spall), so there’s motive. And she’s an independent woman, which — in the eyes of the stodgy, sexist men who run things in this quaint village — makes her a de facto delinquent even before you factor in those filthy notes.

If this based-on-a-true-story premise strikes you as Le Corbeau remade as a droll farce — or the starting point for the single most vulgar Ealing Comedy imaginable — then Wicked Little Letters already has you in the palm of its ink-stained hands. Threading a throwback provincial-Britcom scenario with bawdy, nasty bits of business, director Thea Sharrock and screenwriter Jonny Sweet giddily play off the combustion of the two forms colliding headfirst into each other. There’s a long tradition of presenting England’s smalltown shopkeepers, pub-tenders, constables and vicars as kindly, communal folks who keep calm and carry on in the name of queen and country. Rarely has such stiff upper lips framed such eloquent, perpetually spewing pottymouths.

And rarely has an actor of such high caliber been given the opportunity to whisper, shriek and recite such toe-curdling phrases as “you bag of country-whore piss.” Long before she was thrice-nominated for Academy Awards and wowed international audiences with her mercurial regent in Poor Things (2019), Olivia Colman was one of British film and TV’s best-kept secrets. She’s always been the sort of versatile performer that could do broad innuendo-laden comedy (Hot Fuzz), trauma-based tragedy (Tyrannosaur), and toggle between filling a screen and supporting those who had the spotlight. (She’s also intimately familiar with the dynamic of small-town crimes and secrets, as anyone who knows her from the series Broadchurch could tell you.)

You can almost feel her culling small crumbs of business from a dozen or so past turns as she portrays Edith, from the dutiful, long-suffering offspring in The Father to the complicated, cracking-up-in-slow-motion woman in The Lost Daughter. What this role really gives her, besides the opportunity to dig her teeth into tawdry dialogue along with her castmates (everyone gets a shot at speaking these swearing showstoppers), is a bid for being crowned the Queen of Reaction Shots. Nobody can do more or give you more options with a wordless facial expression, whether it’s shock, shame, suppressed joy, even-more-suppressed anger or a sort of dizzying psychological snap in half. Her scenes with Buckley, in which the irresistible urge of Irish bonhomie butts up against the immovable object of passive-aggressive politeness and repression, are like watching musicians play off against each other’s weaving melodies and riffs. Colman is a national treasure, and thank god the United Kingdom was generous enough to share her with the rest of us.

The mystery behind who’s really scribbling these ornate, scatological haikus is actually the least interesting part of what’s happening onscreen; you’ll have guessed correctly long before Littlehampton’s Browning of bad words is revealed, though it does give the movie a good excuse to offer up a squad of amateur detectives. Police Officer Gladys Moss (We Are Lady Parts‘ Anjana Vasan, the film’s secret comic weapon) smells a rat when Rose is accused and arrested for the crime in record time. Initially poking around on her own, Moss soon enlists several of the local “misfit” ladies — read: they’re not condescending and compliant like Edith — to help sniff out the actual author of these atrocities. This is where the whimsy of Wicked Little Letters starts to become slightly too overwhelming, and threatens to tip the tonal balance over. The same can be said for the more melodramatic showdowns once Rose’s case goes to court.

Yet neither of these detours into zaniness or zealous handwringing can dampen the one thing that lies at the heart of Sharrock & Co.’s movie: a palpable sense of anger. Given the stifling social mores of the period and the toxic patriarchal attitudes — notably from Edith’s father, whose tantrums over being considered a “Nancy boy” suggest a lot of projected insecurity — it’s not a leap to see why Rose or Gladys bristle at the double standards on display. Indeed, the numerous scenes of “Woman Police Officer Moss” (a title that Rose posits is both obvious and useless) silently fuming and shuddering with anger over constantly being demeaned, underestimated, shoved aside or lectured at by incompetent boobs is nothing less than the film’s subtext poking through the text. Wicked may take great pains to recreate the musty Britain of the 1920s, but don’t be fooled by the cloche hats and frilly frocks. The female rage that powers every frame of this comedy didn’t go away when that decade ended. It’s regrettably more recognizable and still more righteous today one century later.