Alex Huston Fischer, Eleanor Wilson (2026)
A couple of minutes before Wicker was due to start at the London Film Festival, smoke began rising from the front rows in NFT1. Audience evacuation via BFI’s Riverfront entrance-exit; fire engines; speculation rife as to cause – and effect, on the last few days of this year’s festival. Clearly not a false alarm but it also proved to be a minor problem – someone’s electronic device had overheated – and we were soon back in our seats. An hour or so into Wicker, the protagonist, played by Olivia Colman, is at home with her new husband, played by Alexander Skarsgård. He’s made of willow (this is a fantastical romantic comedy). When his wife is miffed that he won’t sit closer to her hearthside, he explains that he is ‘highly flammable’. The pre-screening excitement in NFT1 guaranteed plenty of laughter at that line – one of the few deserved laughs in the whole lousy film.
Some reviews have praised Wicker‘s realisation of a ‘medieval’ village community, but the setting is once-upon-a-time: this is a fairytale of sorts. The village’s residents don’t have names as such. The men are identified by their jobs, and married women as the men’s appendages. Olivia Colman is the Fisherwoman, a singleton. Peter Dinklage, whom she commissions to create a husband for her, is the Basketweaver. Nabhaan Rizwan is the Tailor, Elizabeth Debicki the Tailor’s Wife, and so on. Perhaps because the villagers can’t believe it when the smelly spinster Fisherwoman gets hitched, her appellation doesn’t change after her wedding, and her groom, a phenomenal innovation in the community, is the Wicker Husband. It will be clear from the actors named so far that the cast includes some very gifted people; there are others, too – notably Ella Bruccoleri (the Baker’s Wife) – and they’re all wasting their time.
It’s been standard practice for some years now for screen versions of traditional fairy stories to spiff up their source material with at least a dash of gender politics. In this case, it seems that Ursula Wills’ 2006 short story The Wicker Husband more than did the adaptors’ work for them (I’ve not read it), but Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson wanted to go further in subverting fairytale expectations. How do you subvert once-upon-a-time? In this case, with some tit jokes, more cock jokes, and loads of four-letter words – all received in NFT1 with gales of laughter, as if they were wildly and irresistibly outrageous. Fischer and Wilson are also at pains, though, to skewer the local patriarchy. Wedding ceremonies in the village include, instead of rings being exchanged, the placing of a heavy metal collar round the bride’s neck to signal lifelong subjugation to the man she’s marrying. Bits like this don’t interrupt the jocose tone of proceedings and, because it’s also de rigueur to show the local men as useless and foolish, the patriarchy seems very ineffectual. But Wicker still uses weedy misandry to encourage viewers to feel as proudly right-on as the writer-directors.
According to Google AI, Ursula Wills’ story doesn’t aim to be funny – ditto the 2020 stage musical adaptation of The Wicker Husband. (The filmmakers opted for the one-word title presumably in case audiences got the idea that The Wicker Husband was a sequel to The Wicker Man.) The original – supposedly a critique of social conformity, transactional relationships, and so on (Google AI again) – doesn’t sound much fun but nor is this horny comedy version, and it’s hard to believe Wills’ fable is as slackly written as Fischer and Wilson’s screenplay. How come the Fisherwoman is allowed to break with unyielding tradition by simply deciding she won’t need fitting with the matrimonial collar? The film’s big finish sees the Basketweaver, to mark his retirement, create a Wicker Woman, for whichever villager offers him the biggest retirement present. The Wicker Woman is made of spiky blackthorn rather than supple willow, so her kiss and touch wound the Butcher (Phil Daniels) who wins her as a prize. But why do the randy, lazy tradesmen compete so fiercely for the Wicker Woman since they already treat the womenfolk as sex objects and skivvies? (It’s true the Butcher has locked his own wife in a cellar so needs a replacement but finding one should be easy enough in a place ruled by men.) Since the idea of a Wicker Woman doesn’t allow for tool gags and the like, she doesn’t even offer much for the film’s crap jokebook.
I bought a ticket on the strength of the bizarre premise and the high-powered cast – most unusually, I didn’t even know beforehand who had directed or written Wicker. I soon began to think they must be anglophone but probably not British. Husband and wife Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson live and work in New York and she, at least, is Australian by birth. Why the suspicion they weren’t British? Partly the lavish expletive count (which called to mind the strangely beloved Ted Lasso), and partly the assortment of regional accents in evidence within the village community. Olivia Colman is West Country; Peter Dinklage, with a lot of effort and a few wobbles, RP English; Phil Daniels his usual Cockney self. Elizabeth Debicki and Ella Bruccoleri are Coronation Street, and so on. Fischer and Wilson seem to feel these two elements combine to make Wicker super-off-the-wall. I doubt British filmmakers would have felt that, though they’d have been capable of coming up with a terrible picture by other means.
Resourceful as ever, Olivia Colman somehow manages to seem almost truthful throughout and Alexander Skarsgård gives the Wicker Husband a weird, winning sweetness of nature. (His Swedish-mid-Atlantic accent might have been funny too, if it had been allowed to stand out more from the variety of competing accents.) But too many performers exude wacky smugness. It’s painful to watch someone as expressive and versatile as Nabhaan Rizwan being so awkward and unfunny. The Ursula Wills story runs to only fourteen pages. At 105 minutes, Wicker doesn’t sound lengthy but feels it – a comedy sketch stretched hopelessly thin. There’s no denying the Wicker Husband, from hair and facial prosthetic downwards, is a work of art. (The lead designers were Joe Dunckley, Sarah Rubano, András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász.) But the envious women of the village react to the Fisherwoman’s marriage just as if she’d landed Alexander Skarsgård undisguised, so the ingenious design doesn’t count for enough. Wicker squanders talent.
14 October 2026
