By John Corrado
Based on the short story The Wicker Husband by author Ursula Wills-Jones, Wicker is a clever and enjoyable medieval romp starring Olivia Colman as the unnamed Fisherwoman, a spinster who gets herself a husband made of wicker.
The film’s co-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, fully lean into the comic absurdity of seeing Colman fall in love with – and make love to – a wicker man. But they also embrace the farcical nature of seeing a puritanical small town get challenged and upended by desire.
Fisherwoman is mocked in town for her unkempt appearance, fishy smell, and seeming lack of desire for a husband. She also shows little interest in partaking in the village’s traditional marriage ceremonies, which include the groom clasping a metal collar around his new bride’s neck.
As a joke, she commissions the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) to craft her a husband made out of wicker, and oh boy does he deliver. Enter the Wicker Husband (played by Alexander Skarsgård), a handcrafted companion brought to life through some impressive makeup and practical effects, who attends to her every need. He even asks for a hammer so that he can fix the bed after it collapses from their enthusiastic consummation of the marriage.
The Wicker Husband gladly fulfills Fisherwoman’s carnal desires, but is also attentive, patient, and kind. This gains him the attention of the other ladies in town, whose own husbands seem especially brutish and impatient by comparison. If the village is run under a patriarchal structure, the social order is mostly kept by the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), the local busybody and mean girl who noses around in everyone’s business.
As much as Wicker plays around in the fantasy romance genre, and in some ways serves as loving parody of it, it’s also a satirical take on healthy relationships and gender roles. You will notice that, aside from Fiserwoman, every woman in this town is talked about in terms of her relation to a man. The film is frequently funny in its skewering of this town’s repressed sexual politics, aided by its cast of colourful characters (including Richard E. Grant in an extended cameo as the doctor).
Colman shines in the role of Fisherwoman, which allows her to tap back into her drolly comic sensibilities that she previously showed in The Favourite and Wicked Little Letters. Skarsgård brings a warmth to his portrayal of the Wicker Husband that shines through his wooden appearance, with his careful, laboured delivery of every line of dialogue giving a thoughtful quality to the character.
But the real scene-stealer here is Dinklage, who makes the most of every scene he is given as the subtly closeted Basket Weaver. His character’s fantastical ability to create life out of wicker doesn’t need to be explained for him to serve as the film’s surprising moral centre. The filmmaker’s also smartly use him as our narrator, allowing Dinklage to utilize his resonant voice to deliver some of the film’s most memorable lines.
