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
Injustice
UPS
social
pop
Scandals
Olivia Colman