Wicked Little Letters tells the story of the small town of Littlehampton in 1920. Edith Swan, a spinster woman living with her aging parents, becomes the target of a series of profanity-laced hate mail. Her neighbor Rose Gooding, a single Irish mother with a rude mouth, is the prime suspect, and soon the whole town is embroiled in the affair. But police officer Gladys Moss thinks Rose is innocent... yet is hard-pressed to make the case to her stalwartly chauvinist superiors.
From the opening seconds, Wicked Little Letters speaks volumes about the tone of what you're about to get, by way of an on-screen declaration: "more of this is true than you would think." This movie is going to take liberties with cold, hard truth for the sake of entertainment. It's going to be cheeky in doing so, deploying dry wit in the way it tells its story. But underneath any mirth are some sad-but-true facts.
OK, maybe a fair amount of that is only clear in retrospect. In any case, I found Wicked Little Letters to be quite entertaining, and quite clear in its feminist messages. The script plays up the growing Suffragette movement that's the backdrop for the tale, as it presents three clear stories about three distinct women being wronged by society in distinct-but-similar ways.
Rose Gooding is a woman accused simply for not fitting broad expectations of how a woman should behave. Edith Swan is a woman trapped by her age and unmarried status, desperate to break constraints she perhaps can't even articulate. And Gladys Moss is in a direct clash with a patriarchy that's objectively stupider than she is. Each of the three stories is a good one, and the movie skillfully balances all three (while not too subtly suggesting that things haven't progressed nearly as far as you'd hope in 100 years).
All three characters are portrayed wonderfully by excellent actors. Olivia Colman is the heavy hitter most people would recognize. (And if you know her work, she's the one you'd expect to be great here.) Her character is perhaps the most inscrutable, and certainly the one who develops latest in the film; in Colman's capable hands, she still feels like a three-dimensional person even before then. Jessie Buckley plays Rose Gooding, perfectly balancing the two most key aspects of the character: she's crass and loud, but she's a genuine, caring person under the brash exterior. Anjana Vasan plays Gladys Moss, and does excellent non-verbal acting throughout. Her character rarely gets to say what's on her mind, and isn't even permitted to roll her eyes as hard as she should, but you always have a strong sense of what's going through her mind in every scene.
While this movie has serious subtext and serious performances, it's actually very light to watch. A century remove helps everything play for comedy -- from the ridiculous contents of the letters, to the outsized reaction from the people of Littlehampton, to the galling sexism on display everywhere. This movie doesn't bare its teeth, but they are sharp all the same.
But which of my Top 10 Movie lists is it eligible for? Technically, it first screened at a film festival in 2023, and so you'll find many sources identify it as a 2023 movie. Still, as far as I can tell, that single festival was the only screening that year, and only as a result of that did it find wider distribution. Only in 2024 came its wider release. (In the U.S., that was on Netflix.) So I'm calling it a 2024 movie, and just slotting in in near the end of my Top 10.
I give Wicked Little Letters a B+. It's a fun watch with more serious things to say.
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