Olivia Colman's Wicker Gets the 4DX Treatment: Steamy Folk Horror Meets Moving Seats

Olivia Colman's steamy romance Wicker, in which she plays a woman in love with a wicker man opposite Alexander Skarsgård, has become the unlikeliest candidate yet for the 4DX cinema format — moving chairs, scent machines and all.

The Guardian reports that the film, billed as a folk-horror romance with no shortage of explicit content, is now being screened in a format that more closely resembles an amusement park ride than traditional cinema. Audience reactions, according to the paper, have included "screams on the level of a Taylor Swift concert."

It is a strange pairing. It may also be a shrewd one.

What is 4DX — and why does Wicker break the mould?

4DX arrived in the US in 2014. Since then, it has belonged almost entirely to action movies, and for obvious reasons. The high-speed chases of a Fast and Furious film or the battle sequences of an Avatar saga translate easily to seats that jolt, sprays of wind and water, and machines that pump scent into the auditorium.

Wicker is neither of those things. It is a folk-horror romance starring an Oscar winner and a screenplay that made its lead say: "I saw the script and went: oooh!" — Colman's own recollection, given in a Guardian interview alongside Skarsgård about the making of the film. Yet the format's sensorial arsenal, applied to a story of desire and woven rattan, is producing exactly the communal hysteria the format was built for.

How did we get here?

4DX is the second most-popular of the so-called large premium formats in the US, behind Imax. Its trajectory, as tracked by the Guardian's film coverage, hit a previous high in summer 2024 with Twisters — a "perfectly fine" action movie about tornadoes, in the paper's estimation, that became an 11/10 experience once actual wind and rain were added to the equation.

The appeal is not subtle. The Guardian's critic, a self-described "longtime fan of plane turbulence-style seat movement," argues that the immersive pleasures of the format reached their zenith with that release. Wicker now threatens to move the goalposts again.

The paper's comment desk has even taken the film seriously as a cultural text, running a piece asking what Colman's on-screen romance with a basket tells us about "heteropessimism" — the scholarly term for disillusionment with heterosexual relationships as an institution.

What does this mean for cinema?

The development suggests premium formats are no longer the exclusive property of explosions. If a wicker man can fill a motion-seat auditorium, the question of what can't be sold as an experience — released and reported on 2 November 2026 — becomes genuinely open.

For exhibitors chasing audiences back into theatres, that flexibility matters more than any single film.