Unconvincing, unfunny and bafflingly heavy-handed, this shrill non-comedy fails to say anything entertaining or historically insightful about the true story of the Littlehampton poison-pen scandal of 1923. It’s a terrible waste of a stellar cast, headed by Olivia Colman, although the simple aggregation of everyone’s acting talent does raise the film a bit.
Colman plays Edith Swan, a prim-and-proper spinster in the curtain-twitching world of 1920s Littlehampton, always congratulating herself on her Christian rectitude; she lives with grumpy elderly dad (Timothy Spall) and glowering mum (Gemma Jones). Edith has a problem neighbour with whom she’s fallen out after initial friendship: this is Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a woman from Ireland who cheerfully likes drinking and swearing. So when Edith starts getting bizarre, obscene unsigned letters through the letterbox – and then more and more people start getting them, too – Rose is in the frame, the outsider that all these xenophobes dislike anyway. But policewoman Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) thinks there’s more to it.
