A far-out romantic fable about a fisherwoman and her super-stud “made man”
Wicker
Starring Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Elizabeth Debicki & Peter Dinklage
Directed by Alex Houston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Oct. 23, 2026
Remember how, as kids, we never questioned the absurdity of fairy tales—talking animals, troublesome witches, thundering giants, fire-breathing dragons, a world full of ogres, trolls and elves?
Wicker asks us to take a similar leap of fanciful imagination in its far-out fable of a village fishmonger who weds a man made wholly of wicker.
Award-winning Olivia Colman is the fisherwoman, who makes her living catching and selling fish. When she walks down the street, covered in grime, emanating the odor of fish guts and hawking her fresh catch, the other villagers make fun of her. “We can smell you comin’!” one sneers.
After being chided—at a local wedding festivity—for her undesirability and her lack of a mate, she asks the local basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her one.
Wicker is a bawdy love story about an unconventional relationship and a couple of outsiders—the fisherwoman and her wicker man—who completely shake up their small village and everyone in it.
Alexander Skarsgård, wearing a remarkable full-body “wicker” suit, is sensational as the wicker man. He’s a hunk, even if he’s made of interwoven twigs and tree branches. A wooden man of few words, he’s super handy around the house (or the hut, as it is) and great between the sheets. Yes, in this story, a human female and a fabricated man can indeed have sexual relations, splinters be damned. In fact, their lovemaking is so intense, it breaks the bed.
This isn’t a fairytale for kids.
Peter Dinkage is the basket weaver who creates the wicker man.
Colman, the esteemed British Oscar and Emmy winner, demonstrates her dramatic mastery here, selling the preposterousness and taking her character through a gamut of emotions—and making them all believable.
And the wicker man truly loves his fisherwoman. “I was made to be with you,” he tells her, and he truly means it—and not just because it’s literally true. But he doesn’t want to sit with her by the fireplace. “I’m highly flammable,” he reminds her.
He certainly fires up the village. All the women are a-flutter, the men envious. Why can’t they, too, have earth-shaking, soul-quaking relations like the fishmonger and her wicker man? The tailor’s wife (Elizabeth Dibicki) becomes the movie’s central “villain,” jealously conniving to chip away at the couple’s happiness.
There are twists and turns and surprises, but I won’t give them away. It’s romantic and sensual, sexy and sometimes funny, often poetic and even achingly lovely. It’s a parable about love and marriage, lust, desire and jealousy, outcasts and insiders.
Basing their movie on a 2008 short story by Ursula Willis, co-directors Alex Houston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson have themselves woven a delightful cinematic fable, one that “feels” like a fairytale or bedtime story, although one liberally salted with f-words and sexual innuendo. This is a world away—or at least a couple of kingdoms over—from “Cinderella” or “The Three Little Pigs.”
But like in classic fairy tales, no one in the story is given a real name; everyone is known by what they do—the fisherwoman, the tailor’s wife, the doctor, the baker. It may also remind you a bit of Frankenstein’s “monster” or Edward Scissorhands, two other “outsiders” who made lasting impressions in our collective consciousness.
Wicker will likewise linger in your memory, this story of a man of woven wood who changes everything—and everyone—around him. And wow, how good he is in the sack.
—Neil Pond