If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re the kind of person who spends a lot of time engaging with the internet. And if you’re Terminally Online, you’ve likely been involved in at least one blood-boiling internet confrontation. Those kinds of conflicts are often over small disagreements that truly don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but the emotions can still be intense. That makes it hard to forget about certain online faceoffs, even years later: It’s so easy to get enraged when some idiot is being needlessly hateful, mocking, or just plain wrong on the internet. The peculiar, outsized sense of inflamed fury that hits us all when some anonymous stranger attacks us online is part of what writer Jonny Sweet and director Thea Sharrock are getting at with Wicked Little Letters, one of 2024’s best comedy movies, which hit Netflix on July 27.
Not that the movie itself is about the internet. It’s set in Littlehampton, England in the 1920s, so it entirely lacks scenes where text bubbles pop up onscreen as people message each other. At the same time, the dynamics are pretty familiar. The movie opens as Edith Swan (The Favourite Oscar-winner Olivia Colman), a middle-aged, unmarried woman who still lives with her parents, gets the latest in a series of obscene, insulting letters. Her martinet father (Timothy Spall) demands the police do something about it, which leads to Edith’s next-door neighbor Rose (Jessie Buckley), an Irish immigrant, single mother, and unabashed libertine, being accused of the crime.
And in this setting, it is a crime to send someone a letter calling them a “foxy-ass whore” — the story is based on the true history of the the Littlehampton poison pen letter scandal of 1923, a depressing series of events that saw the real-world Rose sent to prison for the letters, largely because a jury found her social status disreputable. But Sharrock and Sweet’s central focus isn’t on class injustice or prejudice. While they skim across those ideas in passing, Wicked Little Letters is much more about the joy of self-righteous outrage, and how people hungry for attention or validation will often go to unpredictable lengths to get it.
Wicked Little Letters is smart and snarky on that topic, whether Sweet’s script is skewering the local constables, who self-importantly puff themselves up over the case while refusing to seriously investigate it, or how resentful the local gossip gets when she feels like she’s being left out of the loop on a scandal. It’s a lively, funny movie, as more of Littlehampton’s locals start getting aggressive letters packed with the same redundant profanity, and respond to them with absolute horror — and a certain amount of glee at having such a deliciously transgressive scandal to chew over, and such a perfect scapegoat as Rose to blame for all of it.
A lot of comedic drama in this vein relies on underdogs who push back against the establishment, but one of the enjoyable things about Wicked Little Letters is that everyone here is both an underdog and at least a little complicit in their own oppression. Edith’s sad relationship with her domineering father and obvious hungry jealousy for Rose’s more chaotic, rebellious life make her a near-sympathetic character, even as she’s revelling in the pandemonium her situation stirs up. (Colman’s performance here is particularly lovely — from the start, she portrays Edith as a woman with a long habit of suppressing most of what’s going through her head.) Rose is the victim of institutional prejudice, but her crudity and smugness do her no favors when she most needs the town’s sympathy, or at least tolerance.
And Anjana Vasan as Gladys Moss, a newly established female detective trying to prove herself (they existed in 1920s Britain, though they were rare), has a complicated part to play as a cop who cares about the truth, but doesn’t want to rock the boat with her paternalistic, sexist boss — or too-obviously side with the town pariah. The bond between her, Rose, and a group of aging, iconoclastic local women with a strong Golden Girls vibe winds up pushing Wicked Little Letters further into feel-good fantasy territory than is necessarily good for it.
But even when the film starts feeling like someone’s trying to make a #1920sGirlboss hashtag happen, it’s still sparky and spritely — and a familiar vibe to anyone who’s ever watched an internet pile-on, either from a safe, nervous distance, or from the thick of the argument. This movie is a fun watch, full of hilarious, fast-paced back-and-forth banter, and just enough angst to give it some emotional stakes as it heads for an obvious upbeat ending that’s miles away from the real-world version. But it’s also a good reminder for the next time an online face-off looms — maybe it’s better to just disengage, and remember that everyone else out there isn’t necessarily playing for the same stakes, or arguing for the same reasons.
Wicked Little Letters is streaming on Netflix, and is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and similar platforms.
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