Wicked Little Letters (2023) relies heavily on cursing for its comedy. If one isn’t outraged by the flurry of expletives or dying from laughter then Wicked Little Letters doesn’t work as comedy. The film is too mired in trauma and class warfare for any of its sillier sleuthing to have a comedic effect. Wicked Little Letters is a film of two tonal extremes where each half cancels out the effects of the other.
Part of the issue is that the film begins telling this true story with the nineteenth scandalous letter. This means that the back story that motivates these poison pen letters will come later after the film has invited the viewer to laugh at a victim’s expense. Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), who writes the letters and frames Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), is the victim of a cruel and sadistic father (Timothy Spall). Edith’s need to play the victim of her own letters and frame Gooding is entirely the result of a life spent in fear of her religious father.
Gooding, on the other hand, is already a victim of classism before the letters start. Oddly, her being Irish never really enters into the dramatic discourse of the film. Given the temporal setting, Gooding’s Irishness and the lies she tells to “fit in” with her community are linked. Anti-Irish sentiment would have been prevalent in the 1920s and a motivating factor behind Gooding’s deceptions as well as Swan’s. As such, Swan and Gooding are mutual victims caught is a spiral of self-destruction born out of misplaced rage.
Counter to all that very serious melodrama is the Keystone Cops style of sleuthing being spearheaded by Officer Moss (Anjana Vasan). To counter balance the bleak lives of Gooding and Swan filmmaker Thea Sharrock and writer Jonny Sweet interject slapstick into the dramatic mix. Now goofy women falling down and cursing vigorously are cast in juxtaposition to racism and domestic abuse.
Wicked Little Letters is a film that constantly subverts its own dramaturgy without any aim. The sections of the film focused on Officer Moss feel as though they were ripped from another movie and thrust into an otherwise depressing affair in order to give it a shred of levity. The tonal balance does not work and it ruins Wicked Little Letters from the outset.
