\n\tA strange person comes to (an also strange) town and teaches the set-in-their-ways locals how to live and love in the new fairytale film Chocolat. Well, no, it\u2019s called Wicker, but Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer\u2019s film does bear a faint resemblance to that Lasse Hallstr\u00f6m confection of a past movie era, as it does to plenty of other films about a fish-out-of-water charmingly affecting their adopted community. Which isn\u2019t to ding Wicker; while there is plenty of originality to be found in this spritely fable, it\u2019s also nice to see something old-fashioned at a festival so commonly associated with envelope-pushing modernity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThat said, Wicker might have been something of a scandal back in the days of Chocolat, what with its frequent, bawdy talk of sex, of body parts and fluids and fetishes. The film, based on the short story \u201cThe Wicker Husband\u201d by Ursula Wills, is decidedly for grown-ups, despite its fanciful whimsy, a cuteness that risks becoming cloying but never quite does. The mundane disappointments and insecurities of adult life are chief on the movie\u2019s mind, matters of marriage and longing that Wilson and Fischer handle with a winning mix of irreverence and compassion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tWicker\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n
\tAnd you thought your husband was stiff!<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Sundance Film Festival (Premieres) \n\tOlivia Colman<\/a>, dirty of face and garment, plays a loner fisherwoman in a rural village in what looks to be somewhere in 1600s England. But it\u2019s not really England, or really any specific time. This other-earth has customs and mores all its own: a wedding ritual that involves the placing of a metal collar around the bride\u2019s neck, a habit of naming people solely after their profession (Elizabeth Debicki plays Tailor\u2019s Wife n\u00e9e Doctor\u2019s Daughter, for example), and a rather credulous approach to magic. <\/p>\n \n\tThat last part is crucial to Wicker\u2019s story, in which Fisherwoman asks the local reclusive Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) to build her a husband made of the titular material. Her neighbors are taken aback when this patio chair-made man strides into their lives, but they rather quickly accept his existence \u2014 even if they don\u2019t like it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPart of their problem with this hulking pile of sticks is that he\u2019s played by Alexander Skarsgard<\/a>, and thus is something of a rattan Adonis. That makes the men of the village uncomfortable, and their wives, well, uncomfortable in an altogether different way. The wicker man is also seen being gracious, helpful, kind to his wife. He\u2019s an excellent, tireless lover and handy around the house. Which puts all the other husbands to shame and disrupts the social order of this cloistered, paternalistic place. Debicki\u2019s prim queen-bee is perhaps most bothered by these developments, appalled that her former punching bag has found \u2014 or ordered \u2014 the perfect man.<\/p>\n \n\tThe ordered part, the transactional aspect of the wicker husband\u2019s existence and Fisherwoman\u2019s dawning love for him, does mar the romance of the film some. Wilson and Fischer try to soften that origin story; the Basket Weaver insists that his creation has his own free will. But one doesn\u2019t really buy that, not when he seems so singularly programmed to cater to the Fisherwoman\u2019s every need (both in the bedroom and around the house). <\/p>\n \n\tStill, there is something sweet in this union of misfits, largely because Skarsgard and Colman do so much to sell it. Colman especially resonates as Fisherwoman tentatively sets her fierce independence aside and entrusts her heart to another, knowing he could so easily break it.\u00a0Ah, the terrible perils of coupling.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat\u2019s most engaging about the film, though, is its social survey, tracking the wicker husband\u2019s effects on various townsfolk, from the ribald to the, well, fatal. Wicker is, essentially, a social treatise on equal partnership, urging husbands of any time, in any place to be mindful of their spouse\u2019s needs, to find joy in their joy, comfort in their comfort. It\u2019s a nice, if not terribly novel, sentiment, one delivered with peppery wit as Wicker bounces along, occasionally pausing for a moment of deeper feeling.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe film has lovely tailoring, from its carefully saturated cinematography from The Brutalist Oscar winner Lol Crowley to Ren\u00e1t\u00f3 Cseh\u2019s detailed production design. Each actor in the cast \u2014 which also includes Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, and, for a brief moment, Richard E. Grant \u2014 is nicely in tune with the film\u2019s cadence, its complex curlicues of language. Wilson and Fischer, whose last film was the well-regarded Sundance<\/a> horror-comedy Save Yourselves!<\/a>, have a firm command of this weird little ecosystem \u2014 they hold the reins just tightly enough to keep things in harmony, but not so much that the film becomes formally rigid.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPerhaps the ending \u2014 in which a lesson is imparted, as one must be in a fable \u2014 drags on a tad too long, but otherwise Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect. But I suppose that\u2019s somewhat apt for our squalid present tense, in which so many of our own fellow townspeople seem to be digging in their heels and refusing to evolve. Their loss, Wicker says with a tart and withering smile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A strange person comes to (an also strange) town and teaches the set-in-their-ways locals how to live and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[66771,18,117,6319,19,17,327,19707,16998,81227,16999,149295,147983],"class_list":{"0":"post-302868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-alexander-skarsgard","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-festivals","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-olivia-colman","16":"tag-sundance","17":"tag-sundance-2026","18":"tag-sundance-film-festival","19":"tag-sundance-film-festival-2026","20":"tag-sundance-film-festival-reviews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115955729873006542","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Cast:<\/strong> Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgard, Elizabeth Debicki
Directors and writers: <\/strong>Eleanor Wilson, Alex Huston Fischer
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 45 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n