★★★ (3 out of 4)
Finding sex is hard in a medieval village. Love is even harder. So an odoriferous fisherwoman (“The Favourite” Oscar winner Olivia Colman) asks a gay basket weaver (a fine, frisky Peter Dinklage) to make her a love match out of straw. Not that off-putting a notion when the straw takes the strapping form of a wicker man (“Succession” star Alexander Skarsgård). All the women in the village are envious, but not the tailor’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki), who’s mean about everything. The other women in the village get jealous. Who can blame them? Those villagers, also unnamed except by profession, include a tailor (Nabhaan Rizwan), his wife’s prudish sister (Marli Siu), a nutcase doctor (Richard E. Grant), a town drunk (Máté Mészáros), a chief bottlewasher (Gustav Lindh) and probably too many more. The stage is set for something completely different.
It‘s all very “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” until the bond between fisherwoman and human basket deepens. Based on the Ursula Wills-Jones 2008 short story, “The Wicker Husband,” the film is the buoyant creation of writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston in their second film after 2020’s sci-fi lark “Save Yourselves.” Even when the film squeezes in too many characters, its charm feels wonderfully weird.
Prepare for something completely different.
Colman digs into the role of the village punching bag mocked for her smell, her looks and her unmarried status. It’s a kinky kick to watch her warm to her new inamorato who turns out to offer considerably more than sturdy craftsmanship. Tender, soulful and sexually gifted, he awakens desires in the fisherwoman she never imagined. And she’s not alone. The big guy, amusingly deadpanned by Skarsgård, is suddenly an object of lust. And not just that, he does chores and whispers sweet pre-Hallmark nothings to his fish lady like “I was made to be with you” and “You are the only reason that I live and breathe.”
What’s a few scratchy bristles with qualifications like that? Cornball? Maybe. But Colman and Skarsgård pull it off with genuine humor and heart. It also helps that “Wicker” looks great, thanks to cinematographer Lol Crawley, an Oscar winner for “The Brutalist.”
But the scenes that stick involve the interaction of this most unusual couple. From the first moment when the fisherwoman meets her made-to-order husband at the altar, we’re as hooked as she is. At the groom’s first touch, she breaks into nervous laughter—a lovely collision of absurdity, apprehension and unexpected attraction. The bed-breaking wedding night is a genuine comic highlight, as she discovers sexual pleasure with a husband made of wicker. But the laughs eventually reveal a touching gravity as the fisherwoman explains how difficult intimacy can be after a lifetime of living alone. Years of solitude have left this thick-skinned woman surprisingly vulnerable in the face of love.
The fate of this unusual marriage is endangered by film’s end with the villagers feeling threatened by things that don’t conform, but the note of regrowth can’t be discounted. Flying high on the performances of Colman and Skarsgård, “Wicker” doesn’t fit in any of the usual Hollywood boxes. It’s a surprise package of mirth, menace and an extravagantly generous empathy. Even as the film plunges into dark places, you swim with it for the experience. There’s magic in it.