Review: Wicker Is Carefully Woven Yet Strangely Hollow

A fisherwoman asks a basket-maker to weave her a husband. It sounds like a folkloric riddle, and in ‘Wicker’, that irritation becomes the film’s main idea. In their follow-up to “Save Yourselves!”, Sundance alumni Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer expand Ursula Wills’ short story ‘The Wicker Husband’ into an autopsy of marriage and social ritual.

Set in a medieval village shaped by rigid custom, the film treats marriage as a performative system. Olivia Colman gives a sharply intelligent performance as a woman who refuses to accept the limits imposed on her. Opposite her, Alexander Skarsgard’s quiet yet enigmatic wicker man (literally a man made of straws) becomes both an object of longing for the whole village.

Is there anyone who does period comedy better than Olivia Colman right now? It’s genuinely hard to think of one. In ‘The Favourite’, she turned Queen Anne into a study in indulgence and cruelty. What made the performance extraordinary wasn’t just the bite of the humour, but how Colman let delicateness seep through the absurdity. Every tantrum carried real emotional consequence. The satire worked because she grounded it in something recognizably human.

Then came the criminally underrated ‘Wicked Little Letters’, where she dialled in a completely different performance. Her brilliance lay in the way Colman reworked period manners and rigid social codes into sources of comic relief. She used profanity not as crude humour, but as stressful release. Her expressive performance exposed the repressive structures governing speech and proper etiquette.

What sets Colman apart is that she never treats period comedy as a genre exercise. She treats it as character work first. The laughs arrive because the emotions are real, the contradictions sharp, and the social cruelty unmistakable. It’s hard to argue that anyone working today handles this particular brand of satirical comedy better than Olivia Colman.

Her performances are always razor-sharp, and here is no exception. However, it’s a rare instance where Colman’s intelligence slightly outpaces the film’s imagination. Her character is unmarried, considered odd by her neighbours. The villagers often tease her for her independence and unconventional life. Frustrated with local judgment and tired of narrow-minded societal norms, she takes a radical step. She commissions a basket-maker to weave her a husband out of wicker.

Soon, the villagers grow jealous of the wicker man’s absolute devotion and almost mythic sexual prowess. Jealousy grows into resentment and they set out to sabotage her happiness once and for all. While the film’s originality and wit are undeniable, it never quite pushes beyond its oddball premise.

The problem isn’t just that ‘Wicker’ lacks ideas, but that it treats folklore more as decoration. The narrative drags and circles around variations of the same old joke without adding much to it. What accumulates instead is a string of clever one-liners. Beneath the wicker and straw, the film is missing something essential, a beating heart.