Wicked Little Letters review – a deliciously sweary poison-pen mystery | Film
Before X or Twitter and even YouTube, should you needed to vent your rage at an unjust world on a innocent bystander you needed to go to the difficulty of really writing a letter and posting it. These have been the times of the poison pen letter, an early Twentieth-century socio-criminal phenomenon right here revived by comic Jonny Candy’s gleefully sweary script and a reliable ensemble of British comedy’s best directed by Thea Sharrock.
Swearwords, you see, might be very humorous – particularly when primly pronounced by a pious spinster reminiscent of Edith (Olivia Colman), who appears to be the letter author’s major goal. Or when spurting forth from a potty-mouthed slattern reminiscent of Edith’s neighbour Rose (Jessie Buckley), on whom suspicion instantly falls. And these swearwords are notably humorous – a set of naughty non sequiturs and rococo rantings that derive from the true letters of the Littlehampton libels, a forgotten scandal that terrorised this small Sussex city within the early Nineteen Twenties. “Piss-country whore”? “Cunning-assed rabbit-fucker”? Epithets this fruity are clearly past the wit of man to invent. (And there’s your first clue to the letter author’s id.)
Some credit score ought to due to this fact go to Christopher Hilliard, creator of the well-researched 2017 ebook that introduced the case again to public discover. It’s Candy’s script, although, that efficiently folds the true crime story into an eminently exportable period-drama package deal. And it’s the solid – notably Anjana Vasan because the county’s lone feminine police officer and Timothy Spall as Edith’s domineering father – who permit for deeper exploration of the underlying motives for such aberrant behaviour. Swearing might be comedian, nevertheless it may additionally be the way in which {that a} extremely pressurised, repressive and patriarchal postwar society lets off a little bit of steam.
