TIFF 2023: Wicked Little Letters Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

The best settings an artist can use to tell a story has to be a small isolated seaside town. Whether one is crafting a coming-of-age movie, a comedy, a mystery or a horror flick, having a small town as a backdrop creates a real atmosphere and helps to perpetuate themes of loneliness or community. Thea Sharrock’s witty comedic mystery Wicked Little Letters is set in the small seaside town of Littlehampton, and explores the fragility of a small-town community and how an outsider with a big city mindset can completely disrupt the ecosystem.
Loosely based on a true story, Wicked Little Letters stars Olivia Colman as Edith Swan; a repressed and excessively nosy woman living with her patriarchal father and passive mother in Littlehampton. She spends her days either inside with her parents, at church, or playing cards with other locals. When she starts receiving letters riddled with profanities and obscene insults, she takes matters to the police. The prime suspect becomes Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a young fowl mouthed, alcoholic single mother, whose lifestyle goes against everything that Edith believes in. The letters start to spread to other locals in the town and the police gear up to arrest Rose. However, Police Officer Gladys Moss, as well as a few other locals, start to realize that there’s more to this story and Rose may be framed for a crime she didn’t commit.
Many cinephiles were excited when Britain’s two most impressive and prolific actresses at the moment, Olivia Colman and Jesse Buckley, were going to be co-starring in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. While both actresses delivered terrific performances that landed them both Academy Award nominations, they portrayed the same character at two different stages of life, which meant they did not share any screen time. Wicked Little Letters remedies that and ensures two of today’s acting titans go head-to-head. Buckley and Colman have wonderful chemistry and play off of each other exceptionally well. Edith Swan’s overtly sensitive and religious persona paired with Buckley’s fowl mouthed, rough-around-the-edges Rose Gooding provides for a very fun dynamic. However, the most impressive performance and most interesting character in the film is Anjana Vasan’s Gladys Moss, a sharp police officer who held back by her towns police’s patriarchal views. A surefire breakout performance, she brings a wittiness and emotional undertones that work to vastly elevate the film.

However, from a filmmaking perspective, Sharrock fails to truly capture the absurdity of the material. While the story is so bizarre and full of potential, she decides to play it relatively safe from a directorial standpoint and doesn’t add any visual style or energy to compliment the film’s sharply written script. Though the film is still very entertaining, it struggles to balance its dramatic moments with the dark comedy scattered throughout.

In the end, Wicked Little Letters is an entertaining black comedy featuring strong performances, but ultimately doesn’t live up to its full potential.

*still courtesy of TIFF*

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Tristan French