WICKED LITTLE LETTERS SENDS MIXED MESSAGE

Wicked Little Letters

Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Timothy Spall Director: Thea Sharrock Duration: 1 h 40 m

If you're among the many filmgoers who know that a movie starring either Olivia Colman or Jessie Buckley represents time extremely well spent, the prospect of the two of them together in Wicked Little Letters should snap you to attention.

They've appeared before in the same film without sharing scenes: The Lost Daughter (2021) cast the two actresses as the same woman at different ages, an academic who abandons her family and lives to regret it. The new film, written by Jonny Sweet and directed by Thea Sharrock, lets them play off each other as neighbours in a dingy English seaside town in 1920, one prim and pious, the other a bawdy hoyden.

At the very least, watching Colman and Buckley on the same screen is an improvement over the earlier film. It's the only improvement, but you may not mind.

Based on an historical incident, Wicked Little Letters is an art-house audience pleaser that slaps a veneer of classiness over cartoonish characters and changing social values. The movie is good fun — a slapstick comedy of manners that hints, but only hints, at darker human urges.

Colman is Edith Swan, a middle-aged church lady who still lives with her blunderbuss of a father (Timothy Spall) and mild-mannered mother (Gemma Jones) in a working-class neighbourhood of Littlehampton. Buckley is Rose Gooding, freshly arrived from Ireland with a young daughter (Alisha Weir), a new boyfriend (Malachi Kirby) and a love for a good pub-crawl that makes her a local scandal. Someone has been sending anonymous poison-pen letters to Edith and suspicion quickly falls on the foul-mouthed

Rose. For her part, Rose sensibly asks why she'd bother to write to Edith when she could just say the same things to her face.

The film makes sure the audience knows Rose isn't the culprit. But who is? The potential guilt is set around a small group of suspects.

If there's a villain here, it's the father, whose misogyny and emotional abuse of his daughter are given real malice by Spall.

As for who wrote the letters, you may guess before it is revealed. But you may not be prepared for the glimpses of psychological damage and thwarted rage that accompany the revelation.ΩΩΩ1/2