Wicker comes to us from the husband/wife team of Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, here making their writing/directing sophomore effort after some romcom that got swallowed whole by 2020. And the film opens with a title card to state that it was “based on the fable by Ursula Wills”. The word “fable” is the key point there, telling us right up front that this is intended to be a fairy tale. It’s an allegory, in which the central themes and ideas matter more than any kind of thorough world-building or coherent logic.
Everything about this is heightened, folks. Just dive on in and don’t think too hard about any of it.
We lay our scene in some quaint medieval village where nobody has any proper names. Seriously, everyone is only ever addressed by their occupation or their husband’s occupation (with the occasional term of endearment between spouses). This is a patriarchal dystopia in which a wedding vow is literally sealed with a big metal collar shackled around the bride’s happy neck. The women are stuck maintaining the home and raising the kids while their husbands do all the work and go out drinking. Nobody cares what the women want or need, they’re not allowed to show any kind of romantic or sexual urges, but they are wholly subservient to the sexual whims of the men… you get the idea.
Olivia Colman plays the Fisherwoman, a homely old spinster living in her isolated hut by the woods outside the village. Nobody wants anything to do with her because she’s not sexually desirable, she always reeks of fish, and she’s far too old to be single. Yes, everyone hates her because she’s single and yet nobody finds her romantically or sexually desirable. That’s a classic misogynist double-standard for you.
Anyway, the Fisherwoman is perfectly happy being a social pariah because… well, can you blame her? It’s really for the best that she keeps these primeval villagers and their barbaric customs at arm’s length. Yet that doesn’t take away from the fact that she’s desperately lonely. And while the Fisherwoman keeps a brave face and dishes out verbal abuse as good as she gets, a lifetime of bullying and mockery can wear a person down.
The bottom line is that she can’t stay single, and she can’t marry one of those knucklehead villagers. So she takes a third option.
Enter Peter Dinklage, in the role of an exceptionally talented Basketmaker. Indeed, he’s so preternaturally gifted at weaving that when the Fisherwoman shows up unannounced, with payment to make her a husband, he does indeed literally make her a husband. Somehow, he successfully crafts a sentient man made entirely of willow wicker (We’ll call him “Wicker”, played by Alexander Skarsgaard) for the sole purpose of marrying Fisherwoman and serving as her dutiful husband.
Put it this way: Remember Obsession from a few months ago? Wicker is pretty much exactly the kind of life partner that Bear wanted Nikki to be. Gentle, honest, soft-spoken, and compassionate, who lives only to make his wife happy and wants for nothing more. And because Wicker is a life-sized wooden doll custom-built for the purpose, there’s none of that “bodily autonomy” business to feel guilty about.
Incidentally, the design work and VFX on Wicker are utterly seamless. In some shots, I could actually see daylight in between the wicker gaps, perfectly selling the illusion of a hollow man. Hell if I know how the effects team pulled that off, but it looks goddamn incredible.
Anyway, the villagers had enough of a problem dealing with the Fisherwoman’s eccentricities and differences. So you can imagine how they take to a sentient wicker doll. Things escalate even further when the villagers see how happy the Fisherwoman is, and resent her for being happy. That resentment quickly turns to jealousy, as the wives of the village want the kind of marital happiness that the Fisherwoman has, while the husbands don’t like how their wives are fawning over an anatomically correct pile of sticks. Hell, the husbands are used to treating their wives as objects, and here we have a marriage in which the husband is literally an object! And happy to be so!
On the one hand, it’s repeatedly and explicitly shown that Fisherwoman and Wicker are so happy together precisely because they don’t live by the bullshit rules of this society. And everyone in the village is either too stupid, too stubborn, or both to realize they’re all so miserable and they’d all be so much happier if they shitcanned all these puritanical sexist rules that exist for no reason at all.
On the other hand, it bears remembering that Wicker is not human. He is, in fact, an automaton who was custom-built for the clear and specific purpose of being the perfect husband. Which means that everyone in the village will be upset and disappointed (or worse, as happens in the film) if the village husbands are held to this impossibly high standard. Though it’s not like the current standards are acceptable either. There has to be a healthy middle ground, is all I’m saying.
Jealousy is a huge recurring theme of the film. While we plainly see this in the villagers’ reactions, this also culminates in rumors of marital infidelity, claiming that Wicker really is sleeping around with all the various women infatuated with him. Of course this is ridiculous on its face. It’s perfectly obvious that Wicker is fundamentally incapable of having any kind of relations with any other woman, and we know that every bit as well as the Fisherwoman does. This whole “suspicion of cheating” angle shouldn’t have worked… and yet it does. Because the potential infidelity isn’t really the point, and it isn’t really about Wicker at all.
Remember, the Fisherwoman has been alone all her life. She’s been told all her life that nobody will ever want her, and she’d long since grown accustomed to her solitary life. I need hardly add that her crazy idea for a husband never should’ve worked, we have no idea how or why it works, and we have no way of knowing how much longer it’s going to keep on working.
With all of that said, it’s easy to understand how some part of the Fisherwoman remains skeptical about how all of this is too good to be true. That same part of her psyche keeps telling her she doesn’t deserve any of this, falling back on the old familiar self-deprecation that’s gotten her through so much of her life. It’s a cruel irony that in her own way, she’s every bit as much addicted to the status quo as the villagers.
Speaking of which, you might be wondering why we only get the one wicker husband. If the Basketmaker can make one sentient wicker person, what’s to stop anyone else from the village from going up to see him and pay for their own custom-built dreamboat? Hell, what’s to stop the Basketmaker from crafting his own sentient wicker people just for the hell of it? Don’t worry, the filmmakers thought of all that. Let’s just say the third act keeps one-upping itself over and over again, and the results are wickedly ingenious.
There’s a lot to like about this movie, though I do have to admit that the film’s heightened tone and aggressively blunt messaging got to be a bit exhausting. Even with all the leeway afforded by the film’s “fairy tale” presentation, the film kept trying my patience. In fact, the supporting characters were all so pathetically thin, they could only be redeemed by the strength of their actors. The Basketmaker is a clear case in point — they had to cast Peter Fucking Dinklage and give him some gratuitous dramatic monologues just so the character would register as anything more than a plot device.
And then we have Elizabeth Debicki, the other name player in the supporting cast, here playing the Tailor’s Wife. This character deeply frustrated me. It’s borderline impossible to get any sense of what she wants… because the Tailor’s Wife herself has no idea what she wants. Here we have a woman who’s trying so damned hard to uphold this oppressive and patriarchal system, even as she’s visibly suffering. She’s trying to work within the rules to make a better life for herself, and it’s getting her nowhere, so she’s… venting those frustrations on the Fisherwoman and Wicker? I think? This character’s internal conflict is so convoluted, she’s all over the place, which conveniently means that she can be positioned to do whatever the plot needs her to do in the moment. It’s only thanks to Debicki’s innate charisma that this character was the least bit watchable until her big moment in the climax.
Also, it helped that Marli Siu was playing her sister. Siu turns in a surprisingly dynamic performance, equally capable in comedy and drama.
Wicker works well enough on its own terms, but meeting the film where it is may take some effort. The film is outrageously heightened, the supporting cast is loaded with two-dimensional clowns, and it’s not always easy to tell when the film is being silly for the sake of it or to make a greater point. Which makes it all the more delightfully surprising when it turns out there is indeed a method to the madness.
Everyone on all sides of the camera came to play. Each individual actor and every last VFX artist succeeded admirably well in all their efforts to sell this perfectly ridiculous premise. Perhaps more importantly, as a satirical allegory about jealousy, human connection, and all the myriad ways that everyone of all genders is made to suffer under patriarchal rule, the film works quite elegantly. I’m glad the film outright opens with a notice that this is a grown-up fairy tale — if that’s what you’re interested in and prepared to see, it’s well worth checking out.
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