One of the best comedies of 2024, now on Netflix, is balm for the internet-weary soul

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re the type of person who spends a lot of time on the internet. And if you’re Terminally Online, you’ve probably been involved in at least one bloodcurdling internet confrontation. Such conflicts are often over minor disagreements that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but the emotions can still run high. That makes it hard to forget certain online confrontations, even years later: It’s so easy to get enraged when an idiot is called out unnecessarily hateful, mockingor simply error on internetThe peculiar, outrageous sense of inflamed rage that hits us all when an anonymous stranger attacks us online is part of what writer Jonny Sweet and director Thea Sharrock want to achieve with Evil Little Lettersone of the best comedies of 2024, coming to Netflix on July 27.

Not that the film itself is about the Internet. It’s set in Littlehampton, England in the 1920s, so it completely lacks scenes where speech bubbles appear on the screen while people text each other. At the same time, the dynamic is pretty familiar. The film opens as Edith Swan (The favorite Oscar winner Olivia Colman), a middle-aged unmarried woman living with her parents, receives the latest in a series of obscene, insulting letters. Her martinet father (Timothy Spall) demands that the police do something about it, which leads to Edith’s neighbor Rose (Jessie Buckley), an Irish immigrant, single mother, and shameless promiscuous woman, being framed for the crime.

And in this setting, it is a crime to send someone a letter calling them a “foxy-ass whore” – the story is based on the true history of the Littlehampton poison pen letter scandal of 1923a depressing series of events that saw the real Rose sent to prison for the letters, largely because a jury deemed her social status unreliable. But Sharrock and Sweet don’t primarily focus on class injustice or prejudice. While they run through those ideas in passing, Evil Little Letters is much more about the joy of self-righteous indignation, and how people who are hungry for attention or recognition will often go to unpredictable lengths to get it.

Evil Little Letters is smart and sarcastic on the subject, whether Sweet’s script is skewering the local cops who puff themselves up over the case while refusing to investigate it seriously, or how incensed the local gossipmongers become when she feels left out of a scandal. It’s a lively, funny film, as more Littlehampton residents receive aggressive letters full of the same unnecessary profanity, and they react to them with absolute disgust – and a certain amount of glee at having such a deliciously transgressive scandal to chew on, and such a perfect scapegoat as Rose to blame it on.

Many comedy dramas in this vein are based on underdogs rebelling against the establishment, but one of the nice things about Evil Little Letters is that everyone here is both an underdog and at least a little complicit in their own oppression. Edith’s sad relationship with her domineering father and clear, hungry jealousy of Rose’s more chaotic, rebellious life make her an almost sympathetic character, even as she revels in the chaos her situation causes. (Colman’s performance here is particularly fine — from the start, she portrays Edith as a woman with a long habit of repressing most of what goes through her mind.) Rose is the victim of institutional prejudice, but her coarseness and self-righteousness do her no favors when she most needs the town’s sympathy, or at the very least, tolerance.

Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh, Sony Pictures/Everett Collection

And Anjana Vasan as Gladys Moss, a newly minted female detective trying to prove herself (they existed in 1920s Britain, although they were rare), has a complicated role to play as a cop who cares about the truth but doesn’t want to rock the boat with her paternalistic, sexist boss — or side too clearly with the town’s pariah. The bond between her, Rose, and a group of older, iconoclastic local women with a strong Golden Girls vibe makes Evil Little Letters getting further into the feel-good fantasy realm than is necessarily good.

But even when the film starts to feel like someone’s trying to create a #1920sGirlboss hashtag, it’s still bright and lively – and a familiar vibe to anyone who’s ever watched an internet pile-on, either from a safe, nervous distance or from the thick of it. This film is a fun watch, full of hilarious, rapid-fire back-and-forth banter and just enough dread to give it some emotional stakes as it races toward a decidedly optimistic ending that’s miles removed from the real thing. But it’s also a good reminder the next time an online confrontation arises – maybe it’s better to just back off and remember that not everyone out there is necessarily playing for the same stakes, or arguing for the same reasons.

Evil Little Letters is streaming on Netflix and available for digital rental or purchase at Amazon, Apple TVand similar platforms.