Wicker (2026) Review: Olivia Colman's Salty Folk Fable

The premise is simple enough to fit on a postcard: Fisherwoman, single and perpetually ridiculed for her smell and her solitude, decides to buy herself a spouse from the local Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage, weary and wonderful). The husband arrives as a seven-foot-tall lattice of willow and reed, and then, because this is a fantasy, he starts to move. Skarsgård plays Wicker Husband with the physical precision of a dancer and the emotional restraint of a silent-film star. He does not speak much. He does not need to. His creaking joints and hesitant gestures say more about devotion than most monologues manage in a lifetime.

The village, naturally, erupts. The Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki, dripping with passive aggression) leads the charge of the scandalised, while the Innkeeper (Kiell Smith-Bynoe) turns gossip into a cottage industry. The Doctor (Richard E. Grant) offers a diagnosis of "unnatural affection" with the smugness of a man who has never been loved by anyone or anything. Fischer, working from a script that favours wry observation over punchlines, lets the absurdity breathe. The chaos escalates not through grand gestures but through whispers, side-eyes, and the slow poison of conformity.

What could have been a one-joke sketch becomes something richer in Fischer’s hands. The director understands that the comedy here is not in the wicker husband himself but in the villagers’ reaction to him. The film’s sharpest scenes are the small ones: a queue at the bakery turning frosty, a church pew clearing by inches, a tailor measuring a man who is technically a basket. There is a whiff of Local Hero and a touch of The Lobster here, but Fischer never leans too hard on his influences. He trusts Colman to carry the emotional weight, and she does so with a performance that is by turns furious, wounded, and disarmingly gentle.

If there is a stumble, it is in the middle stretch, where the film’s episodic structure starts to sag. A subplot involving the Basket Weaver’s Sister (Marli Siu) and the Tailor (Nabhaan Rizwan) feels underwritten, as if the screenplay lost confidence in its own central romance and reached for a conventional counterpoint. The fantasy elements, too, are kept deliberately vague - Wicker Husband’s animation is never explained, and Fischer seems uninterested in the rules of his own world. That is a choice, and for the most part it works, but a few more boundaries might have sharpened the stakes.

Still, the final act is a knockout. The image of Colman and Skarsgård walking along the shore - one of flesh and vinegar, one of willow and silence - is the kind of thing that sticks with you. Wicker is not a perfect film. It is a film that takes a genuine risk, and in a marketplace of sequels and reboots, that counts for something. It is also very funny, in a dry, salt-bleached way. The line readings from Grant and Debicki alone are worth the price of admission.

Pros

• Olivia Colman delivers a performance of raw, unvarnished brilliance
• Alexander Skarsgård turns a piece of furniture into a genuinely moving romantic lead
• The satire of small-town conformity is sharp without being cruel
• Peter Dinklage and Richard E. Grant make the most of their supporting roles
• A final act that earns its emotional payoff

Cons

• The middle third sags under underdeveloped subplots
• The fantasy rules are too vague for their own good
• Some village characters feel like sketches rather than people