‘Wicked Little Letters’ Review: Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley Play Sworn Enemies in Saucy Libel-Case Satire

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic A hundred years ago, before email and social media found ways to slap us in the face with unsolicited obscenity on a daily basis, the quiet English town of Littlehampton was scandalized by an outburst of poison pen letters — a nasty case of epistolary terrorism that today might be lumped under the heading of “trolling.” Someone with lovely penmanship and a very salty vocabulary dashed off dozens (if not hundreds) of blisteringly offensive notes to members of the seaside community, igniting a police investigation and a series of trials breathlessly covered by the local press, then largely forgotten for almost a century.

A bawdy black comedy that isn’t nearly as “outrageous” as it would have you believe, “Wicked Little Letters” offers a tongue-in-cheek retelling of those events for the Merchant Ivory set.

Titillating profanity aside, it’s a relatively tame critique of 1920s gender dynamics, focusing on the two women at the center of the affair — a sour-puss spinster named Edith Swan, who received the bulk of the harassment, and her disruptive Irish neighbor, Rose Gooding, whom she accused of sending the raunchy missives — as well as the female detective responsible for untangling the mystery.

It doesn’t take much of a detective to realize that adds up to something fairly rare: a period film with three substantial leading roles for women, set (in the words of the local priest) at “a time when morality is threatened and women everywhere are losing their decorum.” Small wonder, then, that director Thea Sharrock attracted such a strong cast.