There’s something equally impressive and depressing about the squandered potential of misfiring period comedy Wicked Little Letters, a joyless waste of cast, premise and setting which has landed with an almighty thud at this year’s Toronto film festival. A once promising reunion for The Lost Daughter co-stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, it instead represents a regretful low point for them both and for this year’s festival thus far, the only little letter it deserves being an F.
There are plenty of f-words being thrown about in the film, arguably too many, the majority of jokes relying on our shock at hearing prim characters use foul language(!), the novelty of which wears off within minutes. Based on a real-life scandal, it tells the story of a neighbourly feud in 1920s West Sussex between Colman’s religious puritan Edith and Buckley’s rule-defying wild child Rose. Once close friends, a falling out has pitted them against each other with Edith receiving a string of obscene letters and Rose being the number one suspect.
The stage is set for a deliciously nasty battle between the pair but longtime theatre director Thea Sharrock (whose last film was Disney’s painting gorilla drama The One and Only Ivan) has instead set her stage for an am-dram pantomime with every moment dialled up to an unbearable 11, talented actors somehow giving their very worst. It’s an uncharacteristically underwhelming turn from Colman, who reverts to wide-eyed sitcom overemphasis for her pious do-gooder, a major step back for an actor who had been on a roll (I remain one of the few vehement Empire of Light defenders, her performance as a lonely cinema worker finding a connection proving to be one of her most indelible). While Buckley fares somewhat better, playing things with more grit, it’s a thin riff on her rowdy single mum from Wild Rose, an excellent career-best performance that leaves this in the shade. A talented supporting cast also find themselves underserved with a cartoonishly bad Timothy Spall going full ham and usually reliable actors such as Joanna Scanlon, Gemma Jones and Eileen Atkins all saddled with nothing to do but desperately try and eke laughs from unfunny zingers.
Comedian Jonny Sweet’s increasingly tiresome script takes a juicy setup and squeezes out anything that could and should have been fun, leaving a laboured farce with an over-reliance on characters saying fuck and cock ad nauseam. It’s reminiscent of last year’s creaky West End whodunnit See How They Run with actors almost waiting for laughter that isn’t deserved, loud sighs coming instead. That film at least had a plot worth unravelling but the mystery here of who is behind the letters will be a mystery to no one, a Scooby-Doo twist that’s made obvious from the outset and once revealed, it feels like a real slog to the finish line, a sudden switch to pathos as unearned as it is unsuccessful. With clumsy nods at the suffragette movement and characters expressing thoughts on what a woman should or shouldn’t say or do, Sweet makes a vague attempt to say something about the misogyny of the time but other than pointing at it and wagging a finger, he doesn’t really bother delving any deeper.
It’s all rather baffling, given the talent involved, a riotously good time promised on paper turned into something oddly miserable on screen. How wicked.
Wicked Little Letters is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in the UK on 23 February 2024 with a US date to be announced
