Wicked Little Letters
(R) ★★★★ Hate mail roils a quaint seaside town.
Olivia Colman is always worth watching, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Unfortunately, even the Oscar-winning star of 2018’s The Favourite and 2021’s The Lost Daughter can’t elevate Wicked Little Letters beyond “airline-viewing amiable.” In the quirky British comedy now in theaters, Colman plays Edith, a prudish, self-righteous spinster who’s shocked when she starts receiving spiteful, colorfully profane letters in the mail. Suspect No. 1 is her neighbor Rose, a bawdy Irish immigrant and single mother played by The Lost Daughter’s Jessie Buckley. The movie, based on a real-life scandal that stirred up 1920s Littlehampton, is “a cursefest most cute, designed to make older audiences giggle with astonished glee at naughty words.” And
while Colman and Buckley “do their damnedest to make the film charming,” the direction and thin screenplay “render the characters cartoonish.” To me, Wicked Little Letters is not just a passable comedy but “a really funny one,” said Kaely Monahan in The Arizona Republic. The letters’ “delightfully silly” insults “have a flare that’s nearly Shakespearean,” and as over-the-top as the story may be, it’s hilarious to watch the characters react to their absurd situations. Timothy Spall plays Edith’s overbearing father, and he’s the one who sends the police after foulmouthed Rose, said Roger Moore in Movie Nation. As the story unfolds, “it becomes a parable on shifting social mores, sexism, and morality confused with legality.” More than anything, “it’s a vulgar hoot.”