Get the latest gossip
Wicked Little Letters Should’ve Been for the Sickos
There’s a great psychosexual drama lurking inside this otherwise serviceable trifle starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley.
Paradoxically handwritten with flowery penmanship, the missives are prodigious in their vulgarity and often aggressively sexual in nature: “Her Majesty Ms. Swan sucks ten cocks a week minimum.” “Dear Gladys, thank God your dad got shot, you smelly bitch,” so on and so forth. Shocked and bothered, the Swans call in the police, and through Edith’s quiet suggestion, suspicion and blame begins to fall on their neighbor, Rose Gooding (Buckley), an Irish immigrant and single mother whose free-spirited nature has already drawn wary looks from the town’s genteel population. Suddenly, an utterly fascinating figure emerges: Edith Swan as a middle-age woman who ultimately finds power and release — after being suffocated by religion and the patriarchy for much of her life — in the production of violent, obscene, sexually charged words.
Or read this on VULTURE