There isn’t enough lube in the world.
Wicker, a buoyant and appealingly bitter comic fantasy from co-writers, co-directors, and spouses Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, doesn’t waste any time unpacking the magical origins of its artificial life-form. He’s a guileless, sexually skilled literal straw man played by Alexander Skarsgård in a magnificent costume and prosthetic makeup job designed by Wētā Workshop. Within the fairy-tale reality of the movie, he’s created by Peter Dinklage’s Basket Weaver on commission from Olivia Colman’s lonely Fisherwoman. (The residents of this medieval hamlet evidently have no names; they address each other by their job descriptions.)
I can accept that the Basket Weaver can simply build a scarecrow and imbue it with sentience, though it apparently never occurred to him to try until the Fisherwoman pressed a few coins into his palm. But the movie makes such a point, as it were, of Wickie’s bed-breaking prowess that you can’t not be reminded during its various, vigorous marriage-consummating montages that he’s not some forgiving polyblend. He’s 100 percent artisanal wicker. There isn’t enough lube in our perilously petroleum-plundering world, never mind this isolated, preindustrial village.
We must infer that it’s the Fisherwoman’s sheer enthusiasm smoothing over his rough edges. Good for her. The way her neighbors mock her for defying their rigid but little-examined patriarchal conventions—and for smelling like fish, a consequence of the noble work of feeding these ungrateful jerks—she deserves some release. The sum of what she gets is more than some. “The bed is broken again,” her silver-tongued husband observes. “I shall fix it.”
That Wicker is almost as sexy as it is funny is a surprising and delightful plus. In a post-screening discussion at the Middleburg Film Festival last Saturday, Colman praised the picture’s team of intimacy coordinators for creating conditions on-set that allowed her and rough-skinned scene partner Mr. Skarsgård to engage in high-spirited simulated humping without embarrassment or crippling self-consciousness. Though she’s secured two subsequent Academy Award nominations for stone-sober dramatic roles since her Best Actress win for 2018’s The Favourite, Colman is most delightful when she’s letting her innate goofiness come to the fore. See also: Last year’s Paddington in Peru, featuring Colman as the Reverend Mother, who runs the Home for Retired Bears. (She also performs the film’s title song.)
Huston and Wilson have adapted their film from a 14-page story by Ursula Wills called “The Wicker Husband,” a more memorable and provocative title to my ear. They’ve also expanded the character of the Tailor’s Wife (nee the Doctor’s Daughter—you see why the Fisherwoman, who has a profitable enough trade of her own, is in no rush to marry) into the closest thing this fairy tale has to a traditional villain, and cast the towering Elizabeth Debicki in the part. At first, she’s sympathetic to the Fisherwoman, aware that this poor creature does not share her statuesque, conventional beauty. It’s only when the Fisherwoman’s virile but gentle husband becomes the envy of the town’s womenfolk (who begin to realize they can demand more of their partners than to simply lie back and think of wherever-this-is), that the Tailor’s Wife feels compelled to interfere, lest the social order find itself splintered like the Fisherwoman’s bunk. (Nabhaan Rizwan is very funny as her decent but oblivious spouse.)
More truly monstrous than the Tailor’s Wife are various of the town’s menfolk, particularly the Butcher, who secures for himself a decades-younger bride and keeps her captive in his cellar. Fischer and Wilson have enriched their narrative playground but casting excellent but only mildly famous British comedians as the other villagers: Kiell Smith–Bynoe radiates warmth and pragmatism as the Innkeeper, while Ben Ashenden’s Baker is truly confounded by the vanishing of conjugal relations with, well, the Baker’s Wife. As embodied by Ella Bruccoleri, she makes a sonnet of her frustration.
For all its 21st-century sex-positivity, gender-fluidity cheerleading, Wicker avoids a surfeit of sentimentality by remembering that fairy tales are also scary, and that whatever lessons they’re designed to impart are frequently complex or even opaque. That would warrant a recommendation all its own.
Wicker (R, 105 mins.) opens Friday, Oct. 23.
