Wicker review: an inventively tragicomic delight

Wherever you wander in the world, you’ll find wondrous stories of companions fashioned from inanimate materials. Much like Alexander Skarsgård’s basket case, woven for Olivia Colman’s feisty fisherwoman in Wicker, the whimsical, witty and wise fable which opened the 2026 Melbourne International Film Festival.

Greek mythology is full of such figures. You have Galatea, the ivory alabaster sculpture carved and lusted over by a lonely Pygmalion, whose longings were answered by the goddess Aphrodite, who granted Galatea life.

Then there’s Pandora, the first human, fashioned from clay by Hephaestus as a gift for Zeus and married off to the Titan Epimetheus. A busy boy, on the golem-fashioning front, Hephaestus also crafted the titanic bronze automaton, Talos, who defended Crete’s coastline – a communal love for his people.

Adapted from the short story The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills-Jones by filmmakers Eleanor Wilson, an Australian, and her partner, Alex Huston Fischer, Wicker is a welcome addition to this made-for-love tradition.

Wicker: blood and guts

Not that Colman’s fisherwoman is buying into the whole marriage game when we first meet her. First glimpsed as a distorted face dancing in a woven basket brimming full of sparkling water soon soiled by fish blood and guts, she’s difficult to discern.

A distance made more pronounced by the opening narration, a strange story of a fish fooled by its own icy mirror image, not unlike Narcissus, that tragically bludgeons itself to death in indecision between fighting or fucking itself. This woeful story is lugubriously spun by Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage’s basket weaver.

He’s one of the few folks that doesn’t treat the fisherwoman terribly, and she always pops a nice fish aside for him as a result. As a busy businesswoman, she doesn’t have time for niceties, let alone bathing herself or her clothes in the river where she catches bass and bream to sell to the snooty villagers who mock her heady stench.

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Prime amongst them is Elizabeth Debicki’s haughty tailor’s wife, all passive-aggressive judgement, aggressive-aggressive gossiping and cultish tradwife tendencies. She oversees the village women being married off in literal neck chains, heavy on the slavery symbolism, to aspiring husbands, like her genteel-ish guy, Nabhaan Rizwan’s tailor (everyone’s working variations of old English commoner).

This involves a The Wicker Man-adjacent ceremony, in which the women of all ages select Dinklage-woven eggs from a basket. They are packed with explosive powder, mostly sickly yellow for no dice, but the one with a poof of marriage material royal purple. It’s dropped and rolls along the mud to the fisherwoman’s feet.

Perhaps if the tailor’s wife hadn’t been such a mighty mol, Colman’s had-it-up-to-here independent woman, unbothered by romance or common company, would have booted the errant wicker egg onwards.

Instead, to spite Debicki’s snob, the fisherwoman scoops it up. She’ll be damned if she makes do with one of the village’s measly men. Instead, she heads to the weaver’s door, bearing a small clutch of coins and an unusual proposition: please weave her a wicker husband.

Wicker: woven lust

It’s fair to say the villagers, much like the internet, lose their minds over the hefty hunk of wicker muscle that is Skarsgård’s mysteriously fashioned man with bulging basket-y pecs (and penis) for days.

Costume designers Tóth András Dániel and Godena-Juhász Attila knew exactly what they were doing when they worked hand-in-glove with the wizards at Wētā Workshop’s wizards and prosthetics sorcerer Joe Dunckley. Skarsgård’s sexy, textile look is predominantly a costume with some seamless CGI assistance, ably assisted by sound designer Andy Neil’s aching creaking.

When the wicker husband and the fisherwomen set to it, they repeatedly break the bed in sweaty “good for her” seshes that ignite their night. It’s lucky that his wicker wotsit doesn’t giver her skelfs you know where. He’s also a dab hand at repairs, including said bed and the thatch roof of their steamy love nest.

It’s not long before the previously scornful baker’s wife (Call the Midwife’s Ella Bruccoleri) and her husband are considering the merits of a throuple, for purely business reasons, of course, with Ben Ashenden’s baker a doe-eyed confusion of strangely unruly feelings.

The Northman’s Gustav Lindh can’t help but think of the artfully woven competition while failing to measure up with his new bride, Marli Siu’s basket weaver’s sister. Emily Lloyd-Saini’s villager is also hot and bothered, as are they all, really, irrespective of gender or presumed persuasion.

Wicker: saucy fairy story  

Shot in curling mists and the rustling flicker of dappled sunlight through leaves by The Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley, Wicker’s lushly drawn world is all the more remarkable for it being Wilson and Fischer’s sophomore feature.

Colman, as ever, delivers a one-woman masterclass, conveying huge waves of o’er-crashing feelings on her remarkably expressive face. Steadfastly exploring a small businesswoman’s passion for her trade and refusal to play by hoary old rules, there’s tragedy when self-doubt sparks jealously when the sneering tailor’s wife spins false tales of the wicker husband’s infidelity.

Skarsgård resists thatching it up too much, playing his gorgeous golem with a quiet, rumble-voiced charm, a more contented version of Mary Shelley’s monster. He’s the straight man in this scrum of Life of Brian-like characters, in which there’s even a scene-stealing moment for a surprisingly sparingly used Richard E Grant as a doctor who’s truly terrible at his job.

Pleasingly, Dinklage gets to go the full Shakespeare, with a theatrically marvellous storytelling style that constantly reminds us we are in a playfully pointed allegory about what it takes to move in this capitalistic world of manufactured monogamy.

Evoking the wild heart of Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari’s similarly sing-songy Harvest, with a hint of Swedish director Ali Abbasi’s beguiling Border and a dash of Pinocchio, Wicker is as tender as it is bawdy fun, swept up in Scottish composer Anna Meredith’s mesmerising score.

Wicker is a tall tale that’s not short of inventive wonder.  

Wicker is showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival.

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