The premise of Wicker is a gift to anyone who has ever watched a romantic comedy and thought: what if the love interest were made of braided plant matter? Olivia Colman plays the Fisherwoman, the village pariah in a medieval settlement run on patriarchal convention — men collar their wives like livestock, women are named by their husband's trade. Fed up, she commissions the Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband from scratch. A month later, she has one. He is kind, devoted, and entirely wicker. He is also, per the film, spectacular in bed. The film was written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who shot it in Budapest with a cast that reads like a British comedy hall of fame: Richard E Grant as a doctor so inept he makes his Celebrity Traitor performance look competent, Phil Daniels as a leering butcher, and Elizabeth Debicki as a jealous neighbour whose hostility to the Fisherwoman's happiness registers, per one Letterboxd commenter, as the villain from Johnny Guitar. The comparison is astute. Debicki's character is protecting the village from a foreign element — or believes she is. Skarsgård's performance is the film's central gamble. Under a full bodysuit, a glued-on mask, prosthetic lips, eyelashes, and hair made from highly flammable flax (his words), he had to locate a character with no inner conflict, no duality, no darkness — just purity and stoicism and genuine sweetness. His previous résumé runs to tech bros (Succession), abusive husbands (Big Little Lies), coke-snorting cops (War on Everyone), and the leather-clad dominant of Pillion. The Wicker Husband is none of these. Skarsgård says he went maximalist under the mask — exaggerating every gesture because subtlety wouldn't register. The Weta Workshop bodysuit (the people behind Lord of the Rings) does the rest. The creaking sound design, reportedly, is also doing significant narrative work. The film is adapted from Ursula Wills' short story The Wicker Husband, which was previously staged as a musical combining actors and puppetry. The Guardian's theatre critic Arifa Akbar, reviewing that production in 2020, read it as a story about insider parochialism, the demonising of outsiders, and the tyranny of conformity — with echoes of Brexit Britain. Fischer and Wilson confirm those themes were live in the screenplay. Dev Patel was originally cast as the Wicker Husband before a scheduling conflict removed him; Skarsgård replaced him, which the directors argue works because of qualities Skarsgård actually has — stoicism, physical presence — rather than qualities he's performing. Colman, 52, co-produced the film alongside her husband of 25 years, Ed Sinclair, with whom she has worked multiple times. She describes reading the script with something like full-body excitement: "I was like an octopus. I changed colour." The Fisherwoman is, she notes, the only female character in the film with her own name rather than a relational designation. She's also the only woman with agency. The comedy, according to Fischer and Wilson, requires the audience to find it genuinely funny that someone is surprised by incredible sex. Colman's reaction shots, they say, are central to whether the film lands emotionally. If the film works, as Fischer puts it, "you are essentially connecting emotionally to a basket." The Letterboxd discourse around Wicker — alternative titles (John Wicker, Fifty Shades of Hay), double entendres about eggs and baskets, and earnest praise for a specific erection sound effect — suggests the film has hit something real in the cultural conversation about desire, marriage, and what women are and aren't allowed to want from a partner. Whether that conversation translates to box-office durability is a different question. Folk-horror erotic medieval comedies have a limited historical track record.
