Wicker occupies a genuinely odd tonal address: it wants to be fable, folk horror, and deadpan romantic comedy simultaneously, and it mostly gets away with it. Adapted from Ursula Wills Jones's 2006 short story The Wicker Husband, the film sets itself in a timeless, placeless village — medievalish, Central-European-ish, English-ish — where patriarchal ritual is so normalized that new brides wear metal collars and nobody blinks. Into this world of social cruelty and small-minded conformity arrives Olivia Colman's unnamed fisherwoman: isolated, mocked, selling unpopular fish (tench, gudgeon — the film is committed to the unglamorous detail), and quietly humiliated at every turn. Colman plays this without a single bid for sympathy, which is the right call. She's not performing pathos — she's performing a woman who has simply stopped expecting anything better. When she commissions Peter Dinklage's droll Basketmaker to construct her a husband from wicker, it reads less as magical desperation than as the most logical thing a person in her position could do. The film earns that logic. Alexander Skarsgård's wicker man is, against all odds, genuinely affecting. The film asks you to accept a six-foot Swede with a woven face as a romantic lead and you do, largely because Skarsgård plays it completely straight — attentive, physically gentle, a man of few words who fixes things competently and, we are told without visual specifics, presents no abrasion difficulties in the bedroom. The film's decision not to explain or lampshade this is one of its better instincts. Comedy that stops to wink at itself dies. Elizabeth Debicki's tailor's wife is the film's sharpest supporting turn — elegant, brittle, furious with want. Richard E Grant's incompetent doctor is a minor pleasure. The ensemble is doing something rare: playing a fable with naturalistic conviction rather than signaling genre awareness. The film's world has internal logic, and the cast respects it. The folk-horror label will bring in audiences who want dread, and the film delivers unease rather than fear — the village's cruelty has the casual texture of systemic oppression rather than supernatural menace. The Shirley Jackson comparison the Guardian reaches for is earned in the sense that Jackson also wrote communities that destroy the unusual without malice aforethought, purely from social reflex. Where Wicker departs from Jackson is sentiment: this film wants its fisherwoman to have something good, and it means it. The climax — described as almost disquieting and certainly amusing — reportedly delivers on both registers without resolving the film's core tension between warmth and unease. That tension is the film's real subject: what do women who want functional, attentive partners do when the available human men are Richard E Grant being useless? Commission one from scratch, apparently. The absurdist answer is played with complete sincerity. This is a small, strange film that will find its audience slowly. It is not for everyone — the pacing is fable-deliberate, the tone refuses to commit to either comedy or horror, and the central conceit demands a willingness to accept its own terms. Viewers who want resolution, explanation, or genre purity will be frustrated. Viewers who can sit with a story that means exactly what it says and nothing more will find something genuinely unusual here.
