Wicker (2026)
A fisherwoman asks a basketmaker to make her a husband. Nobody in Wicker winks at the absurdity. That decision holds the film up. Olivia Colman plays the request as a practical errand from a lonely outsider, so the fable starts on solid ground rather than in whimsy.
What arrives is Alexander Skarsgård, built from wicker, tall and entirely without guile. Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer adapted Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story The Wicker Husband, and they surround the couple with a conservative town (Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki, and Richard E. Grant among the faces in it) that treats the marriage as an insult. Outrage and jealousy follow. So does a great deal of bedroom energy; this is a fairy tale for adults, and it knows a husband of wicker has appetites.
A man ordered to specification still turns out to be a person, and the woman who placed the order must reckon with that. The wish soon sours. Her husband develops wants of his own, and her claim on the man she commissioned stops being simple. Where the film lands is on honesty and mutual respect, offered without a sermon, and I found that sturdier than the premise promised. A joke about a body made of sticks turns, by degrees, into a question about who gets to define a marriage when the town, the wife, and the husband each want something different. That is also why the bawdiness works: desire here asks what each person is owed, and the film treats it as part of the argument.
Skarsgård has the harder job. Playing a man made of wicker leaves little room for ordinary gesture, so he works through posture and timing, and he is funny without begging for it. Colman moves between broad comedy and plain hurt inside a single look, as she has done for years. The film is fond of craftsmanship, and it treats the husband as the finest piece of it in the village. The supporting players, Dinklage, Debicki, and Grant among them, add texture to the town.
Not all of it holds together. The stiffness built into the husband seeps into the storytelling as well, so that stretches of the film look handsome while saying little, and a few scenes feel decorated rather than felt. I wanted more warmth where the craftsmanship leaves off.
Still, this is a good film. It is better than its stiffer moments suggest. Despite the title, it has no connection to The Wicker Man of 1973, so anyone hoping for folk-horror dread should look elsewhere. Adults who enjoy a fable with some sting, a sense of humour about the body, and two leads willing to play an impossible love with a straight face will find it worth their time.