Wicker Loses Sight of What Makes It Wonderful

Desire has the power to unmake us. It strips us down to the studs. It reveals what powers us, what delights us, and teaches how to let passion drive us. Wicker — directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer from a short story written by Ursula Willis — is at its best when charting the power of desire, whether yearned for or fulfilled, to reconstitute our understanding of ourselves and our communities. The stretches of the movie that lean into the romance and sensuality of its premise are genuinely charming. When it gets distracted by lesser narrative matters, the heat dissipates.

Like all great fairy tales, the film’s period and setting are loose enough to grant its lessons a universal quality. Wicker opens with a voice-over from Peter Dinklage, who plays the Basketmaker. (All the characters in the film are named after their vocation or their relationship to a man with a notable profession.) “I once heard of a fish in the Arctic sea,” he says, “that caught its own reflection in the ice above.” As his voice twinkles with curiosity, the camera gazes upon the rituals of the Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman): she cleans and guts the day’s catch, and ignores her reflection in the muddy water of her bucket. “At first it attacked its reflected self … Then it became jealous of its shimmering scales. Then it tried to fuck itself. Then it died. Safer not to see your fishy self at all.” In that closing line, there’s a detectable sense of trepidation regarding self-discovery.

The Fisherwoman’s life is composed of unbroken routines: Fishing. Pissing in a bucket. Drifting asleep by the fire. All brutally alone. She lives, with good reason, away from the center of the small town in which she sells her wares. Limping her way through the village offering fish, she is met with cruel words and snickers of the townsfolk: “We can smell ya coming!”, or “Morning, spinster.” The Fisherwoman, who is played by Colman with thrilling ribaldry, offers rejoinders to the disrespectful remarks. “Lick my worm” is a standout. 

Presented with an earthen color palette and a jaunty, string-instrument-heavy score, Wicker has on its mind the nature of how women are treated in a culture in which marriage, children, and housework are where they are meant to find their worth. Its points are rudimentary but well-stated. The Fisherwoman is a woman with no kin, because — as she explains to the creation who becomes her husband — her father died in an accident when she was younger and her mother committed suicide in the wake of that loss. That leaves her to be treated as a pariah.

There’s some bramble to the depiction of the Fisherwoman’s place in this society and how other women delight in reminding her of her place: as an outcast, a lonely joke. But these townswomen — whether the undersexed Bakerwoman (Ella Bruccoleri ) or the prim, cruel busybody the Tailor’s Wife (a deliciously scheming Elizabeth Debicki) — are deeply unhappy with their own lot in life. To be a wife in this world is to be unhappy with your sacrifices yet unable or unwilling to choose otherwise forM yourself. Just listen to the way these women advise the Tailor’s Wife’s Sister: Men are meant to steered and guided, fed and fucked, but nowhere in the way marriage is set up is pleasure or respect to be found for the woman a part of this balance. 

It is these swirling forces of loneliness and casual cruelty that lead the Fisherwoman to bring an unusual request to the Basketmaker: “I want you to make me a husband.” Shock briefly marks his face before he gathers her payment and responds, “See you at the chapel in a month.” The film takes care to limn the Basketmaker’s artistic philosophies. He looks at helping the Fisherwoman as a righteous task; he creates an “elegant vessel” whose “character will be his own to choose.” The union between the Fisherwoman and the wicker that will become a man acts as an argument: Love is a risk, one that can reveal parts of yourself that surprise you. But whoever your love may be, they should make your life better. 

When the resulting creation, Alexander Skarsgård as the Wicker Husband, enters the picture, the film similarly comes alive. We get to delight in the dumbfounded reactions of the townsfolk as the Wicker Husband asks for a suit from the Tailor and shoes from the Shoemaker. We finally see him in all his glory, waiting at the chapel as the Fisherwoman enters, holding white flowers clutched to her chest. Hulking in size and made almost entirely out of wicker, he’s kind and engaged in a way that immediately sets him apart from the blithely uncaring men of the town.

It is after this union that Wicker enters its best sequences. Skarsgård plays the Wicker Husband with an effectively stilted, gentle way of speaking. Each word and breath carries such a luxurious weight that they provide a rapturous quality to lines such as “You are the reason I live and breathe”. In an early moment, he responds to her initial awkwardness in his presence with a compliment that has the divine air and purpose of a prayer, “I was made to be with you.” As they grow comfortable with each other, the Wicker Husband proves to be strong, strapping, sweet, and a bit weird in a way that compliments the Fisherwoman.

It helps that he’s remarkably attuned to her physical pleasure. He can throw her around, switch positions with ease, and send the Fisherwoman into shrieking orgasms that jar townsfolks trying to sleep in their homes. The sex scenes aren’t explicit, but they have a charm borne of the chemistry that Skarsgård and Colman share. Every time the Wicker Husband moves you can hear the tightening and stretching of the wood that makes up his body — including when he first gets a hard-on with the Fisherwoman. The actors easily sell the idea that these characters are awash in the genuine pleasures of mutual respect and desire. 

This sets up a stark contrast between their bliss and the matrimonial drudgery the townspeople endure. Their great love is confounding to onlookers. When asked at a bar why he fixes up the Fisherwoman’s roof, and her door, and the bed, the Wicker Husband responds with a simple truth: “It makes her happy. Then I am happy. Then the bed needs to be fixed.” How wonderful. 

The performances from Colman, Skarsgård, and Debicki are the standouts, and Richard E. Grant is quite engaging with his brief appearance as the town’s terrible doctor. It’s rare to see an older woman’s sexuality and interiority explored with authenticity and care, and it’s through Colman’s performance that the most intriguing thematic threads in Wicker come together: What is the price of being a woman who refuses to make herself small for a world that runs on women’s subjugation? How does loneliness become self-defeating armor? How can love and passion transform us?

Ahead of the movie’s release, the marketing team behind Wicker (which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January) has already worked audiences into a froth by presenting it as a wholly horny and weird fairy-tale fantasia. In an era in which smut, about romantic monsters and other fantasies, draws large readership and Heated Rivalry has ignited television viewers to want more from romance, Wicker has impeccable timing. It’s frustrating, then, that the film front-loads the sex before its focus veers elsewhere. I regret to inform you that Wicker is nowhere near as horny as it needs to be.

As the film reaches its halfway point, the gaze of the filmmakers drifts away from the particulars of the central relationship and toward its impact on the townsfolk: how this torrid love affair ripples through their psyches and brings them to question the manner in which they live their lives. To the people in this small, spiteful community, men aren’t supposed to act like the Wicker Husband: engaged, thoughtful, lustful, and good-natured. The women, it goes without saying, are definitely not supposed to carry themselves with the sort of independence and fierce dedication to their own desires that the Fisherwoman displays. We still get to see flashes of the sensuality in their relationship — gardening, walking through fields, letting a ladybug trace paths along their fingers in the noonday sun, a lovely dance sequence — but the narrative turns in the back half seem rushed in service of a broadly moralistic critique of the hive-mind cruelty of the town. 

There is a logic to the narrative beats in the final act, especially considering the filmmakers’ clear interest in excavating why the townspeople are so terrible. It’s all the more understandable given the form of fairy-tales to which Wicker owes a debt. But that doesn’t keep the moments in the film’s last passage from feeling off-key. I was left with a desire to witness more about how the Fisherwoman and her Wicker Husband work together to negotiate their love as the influence of the judgmental townsfolk impinge on it. What’s captivating about the film is how these two markedly different beings make sense of their passion and nurture it in an environment of scorn. For all its explorations of love and lust, Wicker doesn’t quite reach its freaky potential.