Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley star in this surprisingly good mystery
I’m not sure what it was about Wicked Little Letters that initially had me totally uninterested in seeing it. I mean, it stars Oscar winner Olivia Colman for God’s sake, alongside top-class talent from my native Ireland, Jessie Buckley. Why wouldn’t I want to see this?
Maybe it was the trailer I saw for it, which seemed to muddy a rather simple plot, or maybe it was the location and era the film takes place in—there’s probably something in my Irish blood that warns me stay away from England in the 1920’s.
Whatever it was, it didn’t keep me from eventually seeing the film when I was all out of other options, and I’m very glad I did (and humbled I’d written it off without a second thought).
When a series of crass and insulting letters start showing up at the abode of a hyper-religious spinster named Edith (Colman), the woman points her finger at Rose (Buckley), her new neighbour from Ireland, who is a bit of a ‘free spirit’. The two were friends for a while, but things have been tense between them since a falling-out.
What follows is a thoroughly engaging mystery wherein Rose and her friends, along with a police officer, fight to exonerate her before an upcoming trial. The detective work is a bit light and some of these friends are barely characters at all, but the real charm of the movie is in Coleman and Buckley’s characters.
Wicked Little Letters did a good job of getting me to feel for the plights of both women here. Rose is a single mother and obviously the victim as she’s getting in trouble for a crime we know she didn’t commit. But she has an edge to her that makes her likeable. She has a foul mouth and a sharp temper, and she is the most likely suspect.
Her personality is a constant source of tension in the movie. This, mixed with the kindness just below her surface, makes for a compelling character, even if I did experience a bit of trepidation initially at the notion of the film’s only Irish character being an aggressive, alcohol-loving troublemaker.
Edith, on the other hand, seems like she would be the ‘bad guy’ on the surface. She gets Rose in trouble based on her testimony, even though there’s no real evidence. She’s puritanical to the extreme, couching almost every sentence in terms of what her God would think on the matter. Yet, she has a terrible home life.
Her father (Timothy Spall) is an abusive control-freak. Despite being a grown woman, she folds to his every demand on the basis of remaining humble. At first her character seemed lacking in much substance for the likes of Olivia Colman to really sink her teeth into, but as the story progresses it becomes clear why she chose this role.
When the matter of the indecent letters starts to gather national attention in the newspapers, Edith latches onto the praise that the they heap on her, lauding her dignity and morally upstanding behaviour throughout the ordeal. This selfish streak is what endeared me to her character. Much like Rose’s anger, it’s always a character’s flaws that make them interesting to watch scene to scene.
Watching these two play off each other has the added bonus of constantly highlighting the movie’s themes of freedom and repression. The filmmakers clearly don’t have much romanticism for this era of England and aren’t afraid to show how downright awful of a time it was for women especially. Edith succumbs to it; Rose rebels against it.
Of course, there’s no real deep interrogation of these themes. There’s no exploration of the cultural context or why things are the way they are. In this regard, the film can feel a little light at times. That said, the simple pleasure of watching two characters who represent different sides of the same coin interact with each other like this was more than enough to keep me on the film’s good side.
There’s a bit of strained, overly coincidental plotwork towards the end of the movie when some characters are trying to find evidence against the individual who they think is the culprit. When multiple separate coincidences have to happen for the writers to get to their characters where they need to be, it can rob a moment of its appropriate weight.
Despite this, the performances were good enough, the stakes were high enough to keep me invested, and in the end, I had a good time. If the movie’s box office figures are anything to go by, Wicked Little Letters isn’t really making waves, which is a bit of a shame, as it’s worth seeing for Colman and Buckley alone.
And also if you think Oliva Colman swearing a lot is funny. Which it simply, objectively, is.
***
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