Amusing and delightfully sweary, Wicked Little Letters sees a most welcome on-screen reunion of The Lost Daughter stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in a comedy mystery that's considerable charm outweighs its predictability.
Directed by Thea Sharrock (Me Before You, The One and Only Ivan), this zippy, eminently watchable film is based on a true poison-pen scandal that rocked 1920s Britain.
Colman plays Edith Swan, a puritanical single woman living at home with her elderly parents in the picturesque seaside village of Little Hampton, West Sussex, in the wake of the First World War.
After initially forming a bond with her next-door neighbour Rose Gooding, played with joyful abandon by Irish actress Jessie Buckley, the pair have fallen into decidedly frosty relations.
Rose, a single mother who has immigrated from her home in Ireland, is unapologetically loud, sexually liberated and decidedly unladylike, in stark contrast to her Bible-clutching, curtain-twitching neighbour.
Things deteriorate further when Edith begins to receive profane anonymous letters which quickly become the talk of the town and eventually garner national attention. The suspicion for these vulgar missives lands squarely on Rose’s doorstep, and, despite a lack of evidence, she faces losing her freedom, and the custody of her daughter, if she is convicted at trial.
The town’s often patronised "woman police officer" Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) smells a rat, and along with a trio of local women and budding amateur detectives (Joanna Scanlan, Gemma Jones, Eileen Atkins), they determine to get to the bottom of the impropriety.
Although there’s a touch of inevitability about the proceedings in Wicked Little Letters, Colman and Buckley shine as they exchange increasingly heated insults, while Timothy Spall brings a touch of edge and menace to the proceedings as Edith’s controlling, misogynistic father Edward Swan.
The riotous atmosphere of Wicked Little Letters is tempered by a portrait of a society on the brink of change. A rollicking good watch.
Watch: 2fm's Emma Power interview Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley
