If the embed above has been unravelled, unpicked or quietly set to private, you can watch Mark Kermode’s review here: Mark Kermode reviews Wicker (YouTube).
Mark Kermode has reviewed Wicker, and he is a fan, which is worth knowing before you book a ticket. Watch his review above in full rather than rely on our summary, but the gist is this. He admires a film that takes an absurd premise and plays it with a perfectly straight face. He reaches for Pinocchio and the talking scarecrow of The Wizard of Oz to describe how readily everyone accepts a made thing as a person, for Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales and Robin Askwith to capture the bawdy, sweary streak, and for Catherine Called Birdie and The Princess Bride to describe a period fable with modern ideas and an honest heart. He singles out Olivia Colman’s feet-on-the-ground performance, Alexander Skarsgård’s expressive and thoroughly un-twee wicker man, and Anna Meredith’s score, built largely on recorders, the instrument of school-hall innocence. Everything from here on is our own two penn’orth, not Mark’s.
Right, our turn. Colman plays the Fisherwoman, an outcast on the edge of a seaside village whose neighbours mock her for smelling of the thing she sells. Marriage in this community involves a heavy collar placed round the bride’s neck, which tells you most of what you need to know about the local attitude to romance. When she accidentally catches the bouquet at a wedding and the whole village roars that she’ll be next, she responds in the only sensible way: she marches up to the basket weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, and asks him to make her a husband, to be delivered to the chapel in a month. The husband is Skarsgård, built from wicker. Elizabeth Debicki, Richard E. Grant, Nabhaan Rizwan and Marli Siu round out the cast.
The writer-directors are Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who gave us the neat little alien-invasion comedy Save Yourselves! in 2020 and have now adapted Ursula Wills-Jones’s 2008 short story The Wicker Husband. It premiered at Sundance in January, and arrives in UK and Irish cinemas today. At 105 minutes it should be mercifully free of padding. Yes, the title will make a certain generation start scanning the horizon for a cliff-top bonfire, but this is a very different sort of village ritual, and the only casualty, if Mark’s account is right, is a bed frame.
What appeals to us is how neatly it flips an old story. Pygmalion carved his ideal woman, Victor Frankenstein stitched together a companion, and a long line of mad scientists have built brides on slabs. It’s rarely the woman who places the order, and rarer still that the delivery is an improvement on local stock. Mark’s account of the village men’s reaction is the cleverest bit: the women admire the Wicker Husband because he does the chores and loves his wife without possessiveness, and the men are furious because he has made them look like what they are. Being outclassed by furniture would damage anybody’s pride.
There’s craft here too. According to the directors, they had a real wicker suit made for Skarsgård and married it to prosthetics, so he is playing an object that is honestly woven rather than rendered in pixels, and Mark praises the tactile result. In a month when most fantasy is conjured on a computer, that counts for something. The risk is the tone. Bawdy comedy, heartfelt romance and fairy-tale satire are three horses that do not usually pull in the same direction, and one wrong lurch tips the whole cart into whimsy. But on the strength of Mark’s review, the trailer and the pedigree, this looks like one of the year’s genuinely odd fantasies, and we’d rather back a strange basket than another safe franchise. Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we’ve been watching this one since the trailer, and we remain cautiously delighted.
Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy. The Wicker Husband seems content to be a good one, which in this village makes him a revolutionary.
Wicker is in UK and Irish cinemas now from Black Bear UK, running time 105 minutes.
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