True love … Olivia Colman as the fisherwoman and Alexander Skarsgård as her wicker husband in Wicker. Photograph: Black Bear/PA View image in fullscreen True love … Olivia Colman as the fisherwoman and Alexander Skarsgård as her wicker husband in Wicker. Photograph: Black Bear/PA Film Review Wicker review – Olivia Colman finds the perfect lover in intriguing folk-horror romance Colman stars as a depressed and bullied fisherwoman in medieval England. Fortunately, Peter Dinklage’s basketmaker delivers the answer to her dreams – an Alexander Skarsgård made of wicker
Peter Bradshaw Thu 29 Oct 2026 08.00 CET Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T he spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.
The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki .
But the fisherwoman, showing a good deal more imagination than everyone else, boldly approaches the Basketmaker (a droll performance from Peter Dinklage) and commissions him to make a wicker husband for her; this wicker hunk, magicked up in a secret workshop, is played by Alexander Skarsgård . His soulful eyes look out attractively from that weird wicker face.
This new husband turns out to be an amazing catch: attentive, sensitive, non-toxically masculine, a wicker man of few words, great at fixing things in the cottage as he creaks self-effacingly around the place. (This is just as well as it’s still Colman who is earning a living for them both.) And above all, he is a wonderful lover; we don’t see his wicker genitals but there is evidently no problem with abrasion discomfort. (A movie more conventionally aware of comedy might have felt the need to explain this away a little more.)
Instantly, the fisherwoman’s domestic bliss triggers poisonous envy among the sex-starved villagers, especially that noisome tailor’s wife. And it leads to an almost disquieting (and certainly amusing) climax of dismay.
Wicker is out on 23 October in the US, on 30 October in the UK and 5 November in Australia