Every village has rules about who gets to be happy. Wicker, the Sundance breakout from directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, is what happens when one woman breaks all of them at once, politely, and with a receipt.
Olivia Colman plays the Fisherwoman, a woman who lives on the edge of a conservative seaside village and is treated like she belongs there: single, past the age the village considers marriageable, and mocked for both. Fed up, she walks to the home of the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) and commissions the one thing the village cannot forgive. A husband. Made to order, out of wicker.
What arrives a month later, in borrowed shoes and a borrowed suit, is the Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård): tall, red-bearded, woven head to toe, and devoted in a way no flesh-and-blood husband in the village has ever managed. He mends what is broken around the house. He works beside her. He listens. And the village, watching a woman it discarded glow with happiness, begins to come apart. The women are jealous. The husbands are insulted. And the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), the village’s smiling enforcer of every rule, sets out to destroy the marriage she cannot control.
It plays, deliberately, like a fairy tale for adults. The film is bawdy and unembarrassed about desire, and underneath the comedy sits a sharper question about why a community would rather police a woman’s happiness than examine its own misery. Fischer and Wilson, who adapted Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story “The Wicker Husband,” never wink the premise to death. The joke is never that the husband is made of wicker. The joke is that he is better at being a husband than the men who are not.
Colman is the anchor, and she does the hardest version of the job. She plays the Fisherwoman’s defensiveness as armor and lets it crack in small, unguarded moments, so the romance registers as a risk rather than a punchline. It is a performance built on restraint from an actor who could easily have gone broad, and the film is better for every choice she does not make.
Skarsgård’s work is the marvel. He performs the entire film sealed inside a fully practical suit built by Wētā Workshop, acting through weave and posture, with his eyes doing the delicate work. Nothing about it is a gag. He gives the Wicker Husband a stillness and a gentleness that make the village’s cruelty look exactly as small as it is. Dinklage, meanwhile, plays the Weaver as a craftsman who understands precisely what he has made and what it will cost, and Debicki is clearly having the time of her life as the villain of the piece, all polish on the surface and rot underneath.
The craft matches the cast. Lol Crawley’s cinematography keeps the village tactile and lived-in, slate and hay and sea light rather than storybook gloss, and Anna Meredith’s score is jaunty one moment and quietly devastating the next. The production design builds a world that feels handmade, which is exactly right for a story about a man who is.
If the film has a fault, it is a fondness for making its point twice. The middle stretch restates the village’s resentment a few times more than it needs to, and the final movement explains a lesson the performances have already taught. The rare dissenting reviews have called the film wooden, which is at least thematically committed criticism. The consensus is not close: Wicker sits Certified Fresh at 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with an audience score to match.
None of that slows the film’s real achievement. Wicker takes a premise that sounds like a sketch and builds it into a tender, funny, quietly furious fable about choosing a life on your own terms. It is the strangest love story of the year, and one of the warmest.
Wicker is now playing in select theaters and opens everywhere Friday, October 30, from Black Bear Pictures. Running time: 105 minutes.
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