If Jessie Buckley has been on your radar this week, you’re not alone. She swept awards season and took home Best Actress at the Oscars on Sunday for her role in Hamnet. It is, by any measure, her moment. And it sent me straight back to Wicked Little Letters, which I hadn’t thought about in a while and which deserves another look.
The film is based on a true story, set in a small English town in the 1920s, and the premise is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. A deeply pious local woman named Edith begins receiving anonymous letters packed with spectacularly creative profanity. The letters are filthy, they are personal, and they are causing a scandal. Olivia Colman plays Edith, and she is exactly as good as you’d expect: buttoned up, watchful, quietly furious, and deeply invested in everyone else’s business. She lives with her parents. She has opinions. She is the kind of woman who notices everything and says nothing, until suddenly she says too much.
Buckley plays Rose, her Irish immigrant neighbour, who is the obvious suspect. She is loud and foul-mouthed and joyful in a way that the town finds deeply suspicious. She is the perfect antagonist, and the film is smart about how that works. The discomfort the locals feel around Rose has very little to do with the letters, and both the film and Buckley know it.
What makes Wicked Little Letters so enjoyable is that it has the feel of an old school whodunnit. There are local constables. There is an investigation. There is a woman constable being taken about as seriously as you’d expect for the era. The mystery builds properly. But the humour comes entirely from the absurdity of the situation: serious men, in serious hats, reading extremely rude letters aloud in official settings. It is the kind of comedy that works because everyone around it is playing it completely straight.
It’s a film that’s fun without being frivolous. There is something genuine underneath it about who gets believed, who gets blamed, and who gets to cause a scene without consequence. It earns its ending. And now that Buckley has her Oscar, it’s worth going back to see what she was doing before the world caught up.