Imagine an Ealing comedy with F-bombs. Or Miss Marple using the C-word. That’s the central allure of this whimsical effort, which stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley and is loosely based on a hate mail scandal in 1920s Littlehampton. In this version, directed by Thea Sharrock (Me Before You), the pious and upstanding Edith (Colman) receives a barrage of anonymous letters filled with sweary insults and assumes they’re coming from her rowdy Irish neighbour Rose (Buckley). So she has Rose arrested, goes to court — and there, unsurprisingly, the real truth emerges.
There is, alas, not a lot to chew on here. We know who’s writing the letters from roughly scene two, so there goes the narrative tension. The characters, including Edith’s abusive father, Edward (Timothy Spall), and Rose’s secret ally WPC Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), are paper-thin and derivative. Buckley has certainly played a better version of Rose before (in Wild Rose), while Colman, who won an Oscar for playing Queen Anne in The Favourite, is merely on autopilot.
There’s mileage in the idea, perhaps, that the swearing is some kind of psychosexual release for women who are feeling caught in the grip of a postwar patriarchal stranglehold. Indeed the best line in a workmanlike screenplay from the comedian Jonny Sweet is a woman’s cry of “decency didn’t matter when we were working in their factories and driving their tractors! So f*** ’em!”
• Olivia Colman turns air blue for tale of the Littlehampton letters
But that’s trying so hard. The film lives or dies on the appeal of watching Colman, in a prim and proper period context, suddenly erupting with a string of expletives such as “you want f***ing in the nose holes, you old beetle!” in the manner of, say, the veteran actress Katie Johnson in The Ladykillers. It’s vaguely amusing for a minute or two but as anyone who’s seen The Wolf of Wall Street can attest, swearing quickly settles into the background. A movie needs to offer something else.
★★☆☆☆
15, 100min
In cinemas
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