The premise of Wicker sounds like something a friend texts you at midnight: Olivia Colman plays an outcast fisherwoman on the edge of a seaside village who gets so fed up with her narrow-minded neighbors that she commissions a local craftsman to build her a husband out of wicker. Alexander Skarsgård plays the husband. The wicker husband. And somehow this movie is sitting at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film is adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones' short story "The Wicker Husband," and the directors are Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, the duo behind the 2020 Sundance hit Save Yourselves. That movie was a lo-fi sci-fi comedy about a Brooklyn couple who unplug from their phones right as aliens attack, and it had this genuine warmth underneath all the absurdity. Wicker feels like their full arrival. They wrote and directed this one too, and they clearly know how to build a story around a couple that is weird, funny, and strangely moving all at once.
What makes this more than a quirky one-joke premise is what happens after the wicker husband shows up. In an otherwise conservative town, the unconventional romance sparks outrage, jealousy, and chaos, and that's where the movie gets interesting. It stops being a fantasy and starts being a story about what people can't stand to let other people have. The cast around Colman and Skarsgård includes Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki, and Richard E. Grant, which is honestly an embarrassment of riches for what could have been a much smaller film.
The costume work alone is worth noting. Rather than leaning on digital effects, the production built Skarsgård's wicker character as a fully practical suit, constructed by Weta Workshop, the design house behind The Lord of the Rings and Avatar. The result has been compared to the creature work of Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Skarsgård apparently does something extraordinary inside it, delivering what one reviewer called a warm, quietly enigmatic, and transformative performance.
If you want to get ready for this one, go watch Save Yourselves on streaming first. It is a genuinely funny 93 minutes and it will show you exactly what Fischer and Wilson are capable of when they trust a strange premise all the way through. Wicker opens in select theaters October 23 and goes wide October 30, and given the Sundance buzz, I would not wait for it to hit streaming.
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