Wicker review: Olivia Colman loves a man made of twigs

Olivia Colman falls in love with a man made of wicker, and the film nearly gets away with it. Wicker, a folk-horror romance adapted from Ursula Wills's 2006 story The Wicker Husband, revives the spirit of Shirley Jackson while occupying what one might call a peculiar overlap zone. It sits in the Venn diagram between macabre horror and sentimentality — almost funny, but not exactly, and almost disturbing, but not exactly.

What's the story?

The setting is a fabular village with a medieval feel, located ambiguously somewhere in central Europe or England. Patriarchal rituals abound. New brides wear metal collars.

Colman plays a depressed, middle-aged fisherwoman who lives alone in a remote cottage and brings unappetising tench and gudgeon to market. The locals mock and bully her. Richard E. Grant appears as a lazy, incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the tailor's spiteful, elegant, sharp-faced wife, played by Elizabeth Debicki.

Who's the husband?

The fisherwoman shows more imagination than everyone else in the village combined. She approaches the Basketmaker — a droll Peter Dinklage — and commissions a wicker husband. He is magicked up in a secret workshop and played by Alexander Skarsgård, whose soulful eyes look out from that weird wicker face.

The husband turns out to be a catch. He's attentive, sensitive and non-toxically masculine, a man of few words. He fixes things around the cottage, creaking self-effacingly as he goes. Colman, sensibly, still earns the living for them both. And he is, above all, a wonderful lover — the film never shows his wicker genitals, but abrasion discomfort is evidently not an issue. A more conventionally comic film might have felt obliged to explain.

Does the village approve?

It does not. The fisherwoman's domestic bliss triggers poisonous envy among the sex-starved villagers, Debicki's tailor's wife chief among them. The film builds to a climax of dismay that is, depending on your tolerance, almost disquieting, certainly amusing, or both at once.

Devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note the obvious pedigree. After all, this is a story about a wicker man — a lineage that runs from folklore to the 1973 classic and its many imitators. Wills's story gives the tradition a romantic inversion. Here the wicker figure isn't a sacrifice. He's the prize.

The verdict

Colman plays it fiercely and naturalistically, anchoring the fabular strangeness in something recognisably human. Dinklage is droll. Debicki is spiteful. Skarsgård, behind the weave, manages soulfulness. The film's tonal gamble — horror sentiment, sentiment horror — doesn't fully resolve, and that unresolved quality appears to be the point.

Whether Wicker finds its audience among folk-horror devotees or romantics remains the open question. A wicker husband, it turns out, is a harder sell than a wicker man on fire.