Film review – Wicked Little Letters

My notes on Wicked Little Letters

The opening caption of this breezily entertaining Britfilm establishes that Johnny Sweet’s script is based on events which took place in Littlehampton in the 1920s but which have largely been forgotten … until now.  This is true, more or less – though in the pre-internet days similar epistolary crime sprees weren’t unknown (Henri-George Clouzot’s Le Corbeau is based on a French case from 1917).  Richard Llewellyn’s 1937 play Poison Pen – filmed in 1939 with Flora Robson – is based on the Littlehampton case, which seeped into popular memory.  The expression ‘poison pen letter’ was a commonplace until the concept got eclipsed by technology (obscene phone calls took over until online harassment became a thing) and books, films and TV shows from the 1930s to the 1980s routinely referred to ‘frustrated spinsters’ writing anonymous obscene letters.  In the month I saw Wicked Little Letters, I randomly came across two widely separated offhand remarks in old movies/TV shows alluding to the phenomenon.

The facts of the case: respectable Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) receives sweary letters and the idea gets around that they come from her foulmouthed neighbour Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) … but, of course, Edith – oppressed by her domineering father (a splendidly venomous Timothy Spall) – is the wicked scribbler.  When Rose is arrested and put on trial, woman police officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) – routinely ridiculed and told to make the tea at work – suspects the truth and defies orders to expose the real culprit before Rose loses her liberty and her child.  Colman and Buckley (who played the same character at different ages in The Lost Daughter) are a terrific double act and plainly delight in the shared naughtiness of a contest which is somehow conducted without malice.  Sweet and director Thea Sharrock treat the whole thing as a romp which takes place in that Paddington version of Britain with diverse casting in a range of roles (an Asian policewoman, a black judge) and a quirky eccentric in every corner (Joanna Scanlan, Lolly Adefope, Eileen Atkins, Gemma Jones, etc).

The approcah undermines any attempt to address the prejudices exposed – mention is made of Rose’s Irishness as a factor in making her an outsider, but no one brings up the fact that she has a black live-in boyfriend (Malachi Kirby).  In this context, even blameshifting Edith’s crimes to be the fault of her brutally controlling father seems a cop-out.  A few authentically vicious lines slip through (‘I’m glad your Dad got shot,’ Edith unforgivably writes to WPC Moss) and the letter-writing is directly responsible for the death of a major character (which gets forgotten and forgiven incredibly easily).  Because these crimes were non-violent, it’s possible to make a fun movie out of them – though in a contemporary context, it’s hard to see the funny side of relentless campaigns of harassment.  Maybe we shouldn’t think of Edith Swan as a sparkly, mischievous Olivia Colman character and enjoy her pee-po-belly-bum-drawers level naughty words when she was one of the inventors of a means of making other people utterly miserable which proliferates via new tech with devastating consequences in the present day.

A sub-theme is that Gladys has to overcome superior officers who mistreat her abysmally and refuse to investigate further once Rose is arrested on no evidence whatsoever (in a funny bit, Gladys quizzes her about her poor spelling and random capitalisation of letters which don’t match the elegant penmanship of the anonymous screeds).  The real Gladys was assigned to the case by a male inspector who knew a fit-up when he saw it – for his pains and forward-looking belief in the worth of women in the police, he’s replaced here by a comedy stick-in-the-mud chief constable (Paul Shahidi).  A crucial line near the end has Edith regret Rose got blamed – implying that she just needed an outlet for her suppressed, impish personality, and reframing the whole story as a female buddy comedy which pays off with a swearing match in the high street.  The real Edith not only signed letters with Rose’s initials but brought private prosecutions for libel against her neighbour and succeeded in getting her sent to prison – only after that did she start writing to everyone else she knew, including her own relatives, with even more frenzied accusations.