Description
When deeply conservative English local Edith Swan and fellow residents begin to receive wicked letters full of unintentionally hilarious profanities, her rowdy, foul-mouthed, Irish migrant neighbor Rose Gooding is charged with the crime. The anonymous letters prompt a national uproar, and a trial ensues. However, as the town’s women—led by Police Officer Gladys Moss—begin to investigate the crime themselves, they suspect something is amiss and Rose may not be the culprit after all.
Casting is just space. The eyes of a female police officer are something.
P.S. The end credits are agony!
I had more questions for the director - Thea Sharrock did not manage to make a decent result out of this material. The narrative seems to fall apart into separate pieces, the symbiosis between which does not happen in any way - Coleman and Spall play one story (a tyrant father and a frightened daughter), Buckley works out another (a single mother who violates the moral principles of the local commune with her behavior), Vasan works on the topic of infringement of women's rights (the only female police officer, stubbornly not taken seriously by the management). Sherrock stitches it all together with coarse threads, saturating the story quite abundantly with shades of the grotesque (Colman and Spall certainly deliberately overplay their characters in order to achieve exactly this effect), which, it seemed to me, the comedy loses somewhat in lightness and, most importantly, in humor. At the same time, it is noticeable that she still strives to make a comedy, and a light, funny, entertaining comedy, even if it touches on quite topical issues. But the grotesque only hinders this, each time leading the viewer into a gloomy sarcasm.
It is this genre diversity and narrative disjoint trilinearity that partly brings the director down. But I would not dissuade from watching, the acting ensemble and the story itself are definitely worthy of attention.