A Tired Fictional Genre Makes a Last Gasp Argument For ‘Grown Up’ Managerialism

Review of Wicked Little Letters.

To a far greater degree than the Republican Party, Britain’s governing class believes that the real spirit of the nation can be found in its countryside. The national stage is not located in big cities like London, but in the shires and market towns, where conflicts social and political can play out in miniature form. Virtually every one of the post-2016 tranche of Brexit novels – most notably Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) and Bourneville (2022) – is set in small-town Britain. Political coverage in Britain is also bucolic in its assumptions. When a Westminster politician heads out into the shires, during an election or in the aftermath of a flood, it is thought that they will there confront what is an essentially perennial Englishness – an Englishness that, it is implied, in some way has their measure. It is in places like these that the temperature of the nation is taken.

But unlike Middlemarch, which depicts England on the eve of the Reform Bill through the goings-on in a small Midlands town, modern portrayals of these places show us a settled idyll. In the fiction and the programming of the 2010s, depictions of these towns and villages are an exercise in pointed whimsy. Forelock-tugging ploughmen; local eccentrics; and a clergy and aristocracy that still enjoy something like social deference – these are always the essential ingredients. This is meant above all to be comfortable terrain, an England that has always existed and will exist forever.

In these depictions, the kick to the narrative is always provided by some outside force that threatens to disturb this idyll: a dodgy developer, an obnoxious interloper from out of town or a kulturkampf issue that divides loyalties. The task for our heroes, usually a local worthy aided by an enlisted posse of eccentrics, is to restore the old equilibrium. This is the basic narrative device behind the cosy mystery stories of Richard Osman and Richard Coles, where acts of gruesome murder are counterposed against church bake sales and colourful bunting. 

The indispensable woman of this genre is Olivia Coleman. Her characters are known for being models of traditional provincial respectability. The people she portrays, we are told, are repositories of a musn’t-grumble English decency and decorum – which is held to be as eternal as the shires and market towns themselves.

But what if such a person suddenly screamed “Fuck”? Her decorous and polite characters often do. The device is the same: a beau ideal that has, briefly, been thrown off kilter.

But with Wicked Little Letters, which premiered on Friday, this carefully constructed set-piece has at last tipped in chaos to the floor. The film is not so much a picking apart of the genre as a keying up of each of its characteristics to the absolute maximum. The resulting atmosphere is one of fever and lunacy. The setting – the seaside town of Littlehampton in the aftermath of World War One – is not a collection of quaint eccentrics, but a traditional freakshow. The residents of Littlehampton are sub-sentient, swivel-eyed and illiterate. They burp, fart, shit, brawl and fuck one another with a glazed, dead-eyed mania. Figures of authority, like the local police chief and magistrates, are not merely self-important but simple lunatics: bug-eyed, shrieking, liable to burst at any moment. 

Wicked Little Letters is about Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman), an overripe version of the usual Coleman character. Edith is a pious, though vain and foolish woman who lives with her parents in Littlehampton, and has started to receive foul poison-pen letters from an anonymous source. The police get involved, and the finger of suspicion quickly falls on their neighbor Rose Goody (Jessie Buckley), a single mother tearaway who swears, fights, drinks and co-habits with her boyfriend. 

Rose is arrested and put on trial for libel. We soon learn, however, that Edith has herself been writing the letters, which she keeps in a portfolio hidden in her bedroom wall. Edith unconsciously hates her overbearing parents, especially her gruesome tyrant of a father (Timothy Spall), and writes these letters as a way to express her suppressed rage.

Olivia Coleman saying “Fuck” has been the go-to comedic device of English cinema for close to a decade. Here it is tested to destruction. It is essentially the only joke in Wicked Little Letters: Coleman’s character is a prim and proper English lady who’s been driven over the edge, and so her horrible letters are exercises in cutesy viciousness (Rose later makes fun of Edith for overusing the term ‘foxy’ in her missives). 

The assumption here is that this gag really is enough to carry an entire film on its own. It is not. This is a complacent piece of work, and it shows the exhaustion of the genre. 

Edith is eventually found out, cackling maniacally as the paddy wagon takes her away. But look a little past this general bedlam and you’ll find the real heart of Wicked Little Letters. This is the local policewoman Gladys, who is the one who cracks the case and exonerates Rose. Gladys is a thoroughly Mayite figure, a dutiful, unsmiling, and conscientious social guardian. Gladys is one of the few sane people in Littlehampton, and certainly the only responsible adult. In the 2020s, cosy English fiction makes greater and greater recourse to grim figures of authority like Gladys. These are the only people – it is implied – who can maintain the old idyll in the face of challenges to social order, which is always ascribed to a kind of reefer madness. Littlehampton is mad; England is mad, and it is up to people like Gladys to corral these loopy bat-eared freaks into some semblance of civilised order. More than anything else, Wicked Little Letters is a depiction of the social theory of Mayism, of Starmerism. It’s an aesthetic of exhaustion that breaks down into absurdism; but it’s an absurdism that, tellingly, still never thinks to leave the English countryside.