★★★

There’s little hiding the glee with which Olivia Coleman chews via her share of the expletives considerable in Depraved Little Letters. A famend potty mouth unleashed. Astonishingly, this new British comedy, from Me Earlier than You director Thea Shamrock, relies on fully true occasions. Although the script is that of comic Jonny Candy, the crudities come lifted from poison pen letters despatched in Twenties Littlehampton. It’s like a ‘cunning ass’ Downton Abbey, had Girl Grantham slipped within the occasional f**ok at excessive tea.

Dubbed ‘the seaside thriller’ in a single Each day Mail editorial, the scandal despatched shockwaves via Littlehampton. Native residents discovered themselves topic to months of mucky mail and a tirade of handwritten and more and more fruity abuse. Whereas many within the city fell sufferer, the lion’s share of letters sullied the door mat of Edith Swan (Coleman).

A pious and imperiously upstanding sort, Edith lives underneath the thumb of her domineering father (Timothy Spall – monstrous) and along with her timid mom (Gemma Jones). She’s the one of her siblings to not have flown the nest, though she got here shut as soon as upon a time. Subsequent door is Rose Gooding, Edith’s polar reverse and a riotous flip from Jessie Buckley. She’s an Irish motor mouth with a gob as course as her un-scrubbed kitchen flooring. It takes all of 5 minutes for the city’s constabulary to nail her with the blame. It takes a mere two minutes longer for us to work out the reality.

Solely WPO Gladys Moss – a fabulously expressive Anjana Vasan – smells a sew up. The proof is slight and largely grounded in her penchant for dropping an F-bomb in public. For one factor, Rose’s handwriting bears no resemblance to that of the poison pen. For an additional, it makes scant sense as to why the overtly verbose Rose would see any advantage in anonymising her tirades: ‘why would I write it once I can simply say it?’ There’s additionally the small matter of it being important for Rose to remain on the appropriate aspect of the regulation for the good thing about her younger daughter Nancy (Matilda’s Alisha Weir). A yr of laborious labour would rob her of each liberty and maternal custody.

Alongside the evident racial bias is a backdrop aware of the continuing motion for ladies’s suffrage. Edith is upheld, by her father not less than, because the antithesis of ladies’s lib. Rose would wrestle to look much less like she travelled to Littlehampton by way of a star flip in Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette if she tried. ‘She’s what we feared would come after the warfare,’ says Edith. Rose threatens an institution unprepared for the post-war world to not look precisely like that which got here earlier than. Removed from it. As Eileen Atkins’ disgruntled Mabel remarks, expectations of feminine decency mattered quite a bit much less when girls had been wanted within the munition factories.

Such is to not recommend that Depraved Little Liars is tethered to biting social critique, at the same time as up to date resonance arises. The movie hasn’t fairly the conviction to see that via. Comparable critique could be levelled on the movie’s precarious method to tone. What opens within the realms of Agatha Christie quickly, considerably unconvincingly, traverses kitchen sink and courtroom drama territory. Extra satisfying are scenes of excessive farce, notably as a capering battle of wits involves the fore. It’s in such cases Shamrock seems to be having essentially the most enjoyable – infectiously so.

With out the energy of plotting to feed drama via the movie’s diaphragm of daft, Depraved Little Letters can’t assist however really feel like a movie making an attempt to have it’s cake and eat it, even is claimed cake seems prefer it has ‘fallen out of some f***ing sheep’s f***ing arsehole’. Coleman and Buckley are super however it’s not fairly a first-class supply all spherical.

T.S.