A potentially good story wasted

  Put Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in the same movie, and good things will follow. But wait. That's already happened. In 2021's acclaimed The Lost Daughter, both actresses earned high praise for playing the same character at different ages.

  Judging by Wicked Little Letters, a comedy also starring both actresses, the second pairing is far from a charm.

  Based on a true story, Wicked Little Letters transports us to small-town England in the 1920s. Life becomes tense when residents of the coastal city of Littlehampton start receiving a flood profanity-laced letters.

   An Irish immigrant with a young daughter, Buckley's Rose Gooding immediately falls under suspicion. Her staunchly religious next-door neighbor (Colman's Edith Swann) fans the flames of mistrust, pointing to Rose as the culprit.

   Working from a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, director Thea Sharrock errs by serving up the story's big reveal after an hour, leaving 40 or so minutes still on tap.

   Sharrock also relies too heavily on the presumption that audiences will be convulsed by hearing otherwise strait-laced characters spout the profanity found in the letters, which are often read aloud.

   Some of the supporting cast seems stuck in a kitchen- sink drama. Timothy Spall plays Edith's domineering father, and Gemma Jones appears as her cowed mother. 

  It falls to a local police officer (Anjana Vasan) to clear up the mess. Her superiors want her to follow orders, much as her late father, also a cop, supposedly did. They have no interest in seeing a woman take any initiative.

   Thematically, the movie seems intent on showing the commonplace misogyny that dominated the time, but these characters aren’t deep enough to fuel the kind of performances we expect from Colman and Buckley.

  Buckley finds herself in a one-dimensional role that leans heavily on showy displays of pluck. Colman? Well, she's had better parts. 

 In an early scene, Rose coaxes Edith toward spontaneity while the feuding women, still able to abide each other, walk on a pebbled beach. We find few such relaxed moments, perhaps because the characters are often being pushed around by a plot that lays on thick helpings of drama when it's not looking for laughs.

  Sharrock eventually starts speaking the language of caper movies, a tonal shift that may reflect an underlying confusion about what this broadly drawn comedy aims to accomplish. 

   By the end, a promising story has given way to blatant attempts at crowd-pleasing and the hopes I had for Wicked Little Letters had dimmed, faded ink on another set of high expectations.