Today ‘trolling’ is defined as the terrible but unfortunately very frequent habit of intervening within a virtual community, any of the many on the web, in a provocative and senseless way offending and insulting anyone at will without having to fear legal consequences. It’s the starting pointMischief at home‘ which however, being set in the 1920s, sees the world of the internet replaced with the old-fashioned mail service.
In 1922 Littlehampton, a town on the southern coast of England, is the scene of a farcical and at times sinister scandal. Here the arrival of the young Rose, an uncommon Irishwoman, widow of a husband who died in the war, a single mother and what’s more with a black boyfriend, is a real shock for the quiet locals: impetuous, little modest, loud and even scurrilous. So, when a series of obscene letters begin to reach the inhabitants of the area, starting with her neighbor Edith, a God-fearing spinster who lives with two authoritarian parents, all suspicion falls on her, who if found guilty would end in prison losing custody of his daughter. She is an easy target and she is promptly arrested by the police but doubts soon emerge as to whether she is the real culprit and the young agent of Asian origin Gladys stubbornly tries to unravel the mystery, against the wishes of her superiors.
Period cinema is a particular hallmark for British directors and Thea Sharrock continues the tradition relying on what might seem like a made-up story but which actually happened just a century ago, creating a sensation in old England. Through the photography of two women who couldn’t be more different from each other and the scandal that linked them, he creates something halfway between a detective novel and a legal drama, finding its dramatic rooting in the realm of doubt even if the mysterious aspect of this black comedy doesn’t seem to be the most important thing because the real culprit is revealed soon enough.
The tone of the film is what it is, unevenly mixing humor with broader social issues such as women’s suffrage, the use of language as a weapon or domestic violence. But the also important themes that are made to slide before our eyes, you see a narrative about women who try to break out of patriarchal and puritanical patterns and the consequences they have to face for not adhering to the narrow idea of how they are judged by the male world – Rose forced to survive, Edith to submit to her parents and the policewoman Gladys who has to suffer the lack of respect from her superiors despite her love for work – is watered down to highlight above all the meeting-clash between two great actresses – Olivia Colman and Jesse Buckleyalready together a few years ago in ‘Dark daughter‘ – which represent the true heart of the film. It matters little that this comes at the expense of too many secondary characters added simply as an ornament to allow the two to shine with their talent because all in all it is the winning weapon that makes ‘Cadness at Home’ a light-hearted and fun game that bounces here and there back and forth between comedy and sentimental drama.
