Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed the series Maigret, a British adaptation of a French story that is streaming on PBS. Tina enjoyed traveling around the British Isles, mostly by bicycle, and exploring British breakfasts with Felicity Cloake in her memoir Red Sauce, Brown Sauce.

After watching Jessie Buckley in Hamnet, I wondered about her previous film appearances and discovered Wicked Little Letters from 2023. I’m a little surprised that I didn’t have that on my To Watch list since I also like Olivia Coleman.

Perhaps, I was a little turned off by the concept. I generally fail to find the humor in situations where one person is deliberately making another person uncomfortable for no other reason than to laugh at them. As it turns out, that’s not what this movie is about.

The concept is that someone is sending poison pen letters to upstanding spinster, Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman), and causing an uproar in the community of Littlehampton. Naturally, the suspicion rests on the recently arrived Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), an Irish woman.

There was a lot to laugh about in this film, often provided by the sly and wry performances of Jessie Buckley and Olivia Coleman. We also enjoyed Anjana Vasan as Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss who, despite the limits of that role in the 1920s, is more interested in solving the crime than her male counterparts.

There is a splendid supporting cast:

• Joanna Scanlan — we enjoyed her recently in Riot Women.
• Gemma Jones — active since the 1960s, you’ll probably recognize her most from the Bridget Jones and Harry Potter franchises.
• Dame Eileen June Atkins — another venerable actor who I’ve seen in various films and Masterpiece productions and loved her part in Tea With the Dames.
• Timothy Sprall — this terrific character actor (who I saw most recently in Goodbye June) plays the overbearing father of Edith in a deliciously vicious way.

In the end, I think what I liked the most was how the women of the community played off one another. They were largely at each other’s throats, but repeated moments of shared glances indicated that they knew that each of them were doing their best in a world that was fundamentally unfair to them. There was a deep mutual understanding and admiration flowing underneath the actions. The men around them witnessed the actions but failed to see the undercurrent.

Have you seen Wicked Little Letters? What did you think?