.

The tone shifts a bit with this one. The comedy and marketing would have you believe it is a comedy but I don’t think that is accurate.

In its opening scenes it is actually quite serious, dealing with religiously justified bigotry, discrimination, intolerance and a certain amount of hate. Sure, the creative swearing sent apparently unbidden in the titular correspondence raises a smile but the way the woman blamed for posting them is treated by the authorities and some sections of the community is all too believable and actually a little unsettling.

Then almost imperceptibly it turns into an Ealing Comedy style romp, with stereotypically British people dealing with small town crime and corruption in a typically British manner, around a quintessentially British setting. Most of the threat falls away, partly because the character being victimised, Jessie Buckley’s Rose, doesn’t seem heavily perturbed by her predicament (if she’s not feeling great anguish about it, why should we?) but also due most of the narrative shifting toward Police Officer Gladys and her band of 70s sitcom female caricatures and their clumsy mission to catch the real culprit red handed.

Most humour that there is in the movie comes from the florid expletives and insults in the letters, that are initially sent to Olivia Colman’s prim Edith and then to a range of other people in 1920’s Littlehampton. This kind of lyrical insulting has also long been an English tradition, as far back as when Shakespeare had Hal call Falstaff a ‘starvelling, elf-skinned, dried bull’s-pizzle’ or a ‘swollen parcel of dropsies, huge bombard of sack, stuffed cloak-bag of guts, and roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly’. No surprise then that this joke gets a little old, what with it effectively having being around since Tudor times. Some of the dirty diatribes are a bit thrown away as well. You want to be able to linger on the dialogue here but it passes too quickly.

None of this takes too much from the film though, which is ultimately very charming. The performances are all strong and the story does have its surprises. I for one did not see the reveal of who was really writing the ill-mannered missives coming, and this revelation takes the film off in an interesting direction. Colman and Buckley are always good and frankly it is nice to see them having some fun after Maggie Gyllenhaal’s masterful but oppressive film The Lost Daughter which is where they last appeared together (although not actually together as they were playing the same character at different life stages). In fact, while she is brilliant in films like Women Talking, Men, Wild Rose and Beast, it is great to see Jessie Buckley shine with a quite contrasting energy in this. It is good to see young Alisha Weir building on the success of her star making turn in Matilda too, although this is fairly standard role for someone like her. (April’s Abigail looks to be a bigger leap though, with her playing a character who is more than a little bit naughty and who it seems is not going to grow up.)

The Ripley Factor:

The narrative also has a very deliberate feminist edge. It may in some respects be about women at loggerheads but more than that it sees women standing up against patriarchy and setting out to solve local problems with the same sensibilities that were still fuelling the suffrage movement at this point in history. It’s not subtle but it is still good to see. Not all of the women’s acts of rebellion are heroic but this just adds to the tapestry.

Coming out as it does right between the late awards contenders and the early blockbusters (when I saw this The Zone of Interest was playing downstairs and Dune Part 2 was opposite) it may not stand out but it’s still a good night out.