Movie Review
Wicker
9/10
TLDR
Wicker is made from husband material: a weird, wonderful fairy tale for grown-ups, with Olivia Colman ordering a man from the Basketmaker and Alexander Skarsgård creaking his way into her heart. It’s bawdy, tender and, yes, achingly romantic.
Where to watch: In theaters October 23 (Black Bear)
The Facts
Synopsis: An audacious comedic fable about sex, marriage, and the absurdities of social convention, Wicker tells the wholly original love story of an ostracized Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who commissions a husband to be made by the local Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage). When her Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård) proves more spectacular than she ever imagined, his soulful spirit and unique prowess awaken something inside her, setting off a wave of jealousy, fascination, and upheaval that threatens the very fabric of village life.
Director: Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson
Stars: Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki, Nabhaan Rizwan, Marli Siu, Richard E. Grant
Rated: R, for sexual content, language, and brief full nudity
Running Length: 105 minutes
The Thoughts
When the first trailer for Wicker dropped in August, the internet lost its collective mind over Alexander Skarsgård woven head to toe in willow. IKEA Australia got in on the joke, posting a rattan bench with the caption “Made from husband material.” So yes, I sat down to watch this expecting a viral gag about a woman who marries a Longaberger basket. I did not expect to stand up two hours later wiping away tears over a wicker man.
Weird and wonderful, this is a movie full of quirky actors having the time of their lives, and I’m not complaining. The marketing calls it achingly romantic, and I’ll confess I chuckled when I first read that. The joke was on me.
Wicker and the Husband Made to Order
Welcome to a vaguely medieval seaside village with very firm ideas about marriage. Men are known by their trades and wives by their husbands’, hence the Tailor and the Tailor’s Wife. Weddings end with a brass collar locked around the bride’s neck instead of a ring. The men expect to be waited on, and they do nothing in return while their wives do everything.
The Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman, The Favourite) lives alone outside town, smells like her catch and couldn’t care less about fitting in. The village mocks her anyway, led by its queen bee, the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki, The Crown). When a wedding ritual involving a hatching egg marks the Fisherwoman as the next to marry, she decides to call everyone’s bluff. She gathers her few coins and asks the Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones) to make her a husband. Literally. Out of wicker.
He treats the job as the ultimate test of his craft. A month later, the Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård, Pillion) is waiting at the chapel. He provides in bed, out of bed and everything in between. When they break the bed, he fixes it, along with every repair she never got around to. The village notices. Wives start comparing him to their own husbands, and the men resent a basket for raising the bar. In the village’s eyes, the Wicker Husband and his bride are to blame for all of it.
Folk Horror Turned Folk Romance
Put wicker in a movie title, and horror fans picture The Wicker Man. This film borrows that isolated village and its mob mentality, then turns folk horror into folk romance. Ursula Wills‘s short story “The Wicker Husband” is about how jealousy eats people up from the inside. Writers and directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, a married couple, keep that idea and sharpen it. A town built on “tradition” proves more hollow than any fish the Fisherwoman has gutted and hauled to market.
The timing couldn’t be better, with romantasy novels and monster romance everywhere you look. Here, a woman literally commissions her ideal man, and the camera looks at him with an unmistakably female gaze. Like Poor Things and Dream Scenario, it rides a premise built for memes, but there’s real heart under the weave. It also makes a fascinating double bill with Obsession, another 2026 film about wishing someone into loving you. There, the wish has a victim. Here, nobody gets hurt by his devotion except the village’s pride.
A Husband You Can Hear Creak
When you talk about this film, even before you get to the performances, the makeup is the first thing that pops into your head. Wētā Workshop spent 18 months building a prosthetic that behaves like woven wicker instead of skin, most of it 3D printed. The face alone is 10 separate pieces. It still looks like Skarsgård while giving the husband a character all his own. Better yet, the Wicker Husband crunches like wicker whenever he moves, right down to his cheek muscles. Every detail is thought through, and Joe Dunckley‘s design has to be an Oscar frontrunner, maybe even the winner.
With Hollywood arguing over AI and digital shortcuts, it’s a thrill to see a leading man who was physically built. The rest of the craft is just as tactile. Shot in Hungary, the village leans on Hungarian folk art, and production designer Renátó Cseh pulled his earthy palette from Bruegel. Costume designers András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász mix centuries of styles, down to Colman’s mismatched “limping” shoes. Lol Crawley (The Brutalist) shoots it all like a rich storybook, its candlelit rooms passing for old Dutch paintings.
Then there’s the music. Composer Anna Meredith (Eighth Grade) gives the villagers strings and the husband recorders, the humble instrument most of us learned first. It’s a sweet, sly touch. The sound team built his creaks early enough to shape the edit. By their own account, many baskets were harmed in the making of this film.
Olivia Colman Meets Her Match
Colman takes what could have been a goofy joke of a character and, no surprise, makes the Fisherwoman deeply human. Nobody is better at bringing characters others have cast aside back to life. She’s wonderful early on, fishing alone, selling alone, eating her dinner, peeing in a bucket and tucking herself into bed. She’s capable of making it through the worst of it, yet she knows something is missing, and nobody needs to tell her. When her husband turns up at the chapel as promised, no one is more surprised. Watching her awaken through being loved, physically and emotionally, is a joy.
At some point, we have to recognize how good Skarsgård is at choosing roles that don’t repeat what he’s done before. His husband is practical because he knows no other way, and he answers every question with total honesty. That honesty can unintentionally hurt, and without any defenses, he can’t follow up and explain, so he’s easily misunderstood. Yet Skarsgård never makes him simple or a pushover, finding emotional intelligence and real warmth inside a literal basket. His chemistry with Colman is so sweet you believe every second of it.
Debicki is excellent as a nasty, jealous, unfulfilled woman who can’t stand seeing the Fisherwoman happy. She wants to be liberated and treated as an equal, but she’d rather conspire against the other women than stand with them. Her father, the village doctor (Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?), arrives in another of Grant’s five-minute, wacky-as-possible cameos.
I usually struggle with Dinklage, because I know I should like him and still find him one-note, but not this time. His Basketmaker is mysterious and mischievous, maybe even magical, though the screenplay keeps that to itself. In two key scenes, he’s alone in his shop talking to himself. The way it’s spoken, shot and scored builds a feeling that he might break into song at any moment. It’s very Jack Skellington plotting in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Dinklage is very good. How does he bring a basket to life? It’s a secret, and I love that the film never explains it. We don’t interrogate fairy godmothers, blue fairies or wizards about their methods, do we?
Love Unto Others
Fischer and Wilson nail the tone. The village gossip about the husband’s “anatomy” is hilarious and bawdy. Yet the film slides into a tender love story about loneliness without missing a beat. Like most fairy tales, it has a terrifically sad climax, but its storybook finale touches your wounded heart and makes it better.
So, achingly romantic? For all its oddities, Wicker is as romantic as Casablanca, Top Hat, Pretty Woman, Before Sunrise or Titanic. Fischer and Wilson have made a new kind of fairy tale for grown-ups, with a lesson tucked inside. Love unto others as you would be loved yourself. It’s one of the most enjoyably rich films I’ve seen all year, and one I’d love to revisit as soon as possible. Just know that you’ll never look at a picnic basket the same way again.
The Final
Wētā Workshop’s creaking husband is a marvel, but the heart is Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård, who weave a viral premise into a bawdy, tender fairy tale for grown-ups. You’ll laugh, then come apart at the seams.
9/10
Where to watch: In theaters October 23 (Black Bear)
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
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