‘Wicker’ Review: Olivia Colman Rides Alexander Skarsgård’s Wood in Bawdy Sex Fantasy About Hysterically Horny Villagers

Sundance: Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer's second feature is a kooky sex-crazed folk tale in search of a greater purpose beyond its premise, but Colman and Skarsgård prove irresistibly weird and wonderful.

A kooky sex-crazed folk tale in search of a larger purpose beyond its whimsical premise, Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s “Wicker” stars Olivia Colman as a prickly fisherwoman who emerges from the fringes of a seaside village to task a basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) with weaving her a husband. That husband is played by a delightfully deadpan Alexander Skarsgård as a man made entirely of wicker fibers, a face that looks like a woven espadrille stretched over a human skull.

This raunchy period romp arrives in spirit of Geoffrey Chaucer’s for-its-time X-rated “Canterbury Tales” and with an A24-ready, Academy-ratioed crisp visual style serviced by cinematographer Lol Crawley (“The Brutalist”). Sure, the premise — originating from a story called “The Wicker Husband” by Ursula Wills-Jones — is a novel one destined to grab attention. But that gets a bit lost in the cast of characters the filmmakers pack into the story, an ensemble of hysterically horny villagers beset by a seeming spell of sexual frustration, and for whom the arrival of this wicker man, played by Skarsgård, upends all their days and ways, tickling their hearts and loins.

Colman’s fisherwoman is largely derided by the villagers for her inside-and-out smelly disposition and crabby countenance, but she keeps the settlement in foodstuff, bringing slimy fish acquired from the nearby river daily to the townsfolk. “Wicker” is a period film with no specific period to call its own, though you could clock its setting as somewhere in the 1800s. Or 1600s. Whatever; this is not your mother’s olden-times cinematic fable. Those unnamed villagers include a tailor (Nabhaan Rizwan), his miserable tradwife (Elizabeth Debicki, radiantly beautiful and magnetic onscreen), her prudish sister (Marli Siu), a wildly incompetent doctor (Richard E. Grant), and many more.

Wilson and Huston Fischer’s film cuts away from the central action involving Colman and Skarsgård to make space for these other individual stories, even as some get washed away in the sameness of their shared suffering. Flesh wounds, fetid moppets, breastmilk-leaking nipples, and sudden gushes of blood make for a Monty Python-style of ribald humor that will alienate and enchant in equal measure.

“Wicker” is at its most naughtily hilarious, however, in the outrageous lovemaking between Colman and Skarsgård. She’s an embittered spinster long overdue for a roll in the hay (or, in this case, with the hay) who lustily slobs on her new husband’s log. (Such puns are par for the course in a screenplay that even employs “gagging” in its modernly outfitted parlance.) And literally, while it’s kept offscreen, the nifty sound design created by Andy Neil allows us to hear the wicker husband’s, uh, growing tumescence that enables him to vigorously rail his fisherwoman wife into squeams and squirms of overwhelming ecstasy. So much so that a bed is broken, and it’s one he’s, who knew, equipped to fix. Husband material, indeed. The lore of how such a wicker man is created, and whether or not he can conceive, or whether or not his sex might be potentially painful given that it’s literally wrought out of coarse natural fibers, isn’t explained so much as it is not the primary interest of the director/screenwriting pair.

Alexander Skarsgård starring in a period fable as a piece of fuckable furniture might not have been top of mind in terms of what you’re expecting from the actor who has recently done such brilliant work in “Succession,” “Pillion,” and “The Moment.” But even as the tall Swedish actor is tasked with overembellishing given the prostheses he’s bound behind opposite very real human actors, you emerge from “Wicker” with the sense that no other actor could have played this creature, coolly soothing as a presence and an even romantic one, too.

While Colman’s recent stint of playing blowzy, socially alienating women onscreen (from “The Favourite” to “Empire of Light”) is starting to feel like an overcooked trope, she imbues the fisherwoman with grounded pathos that rises above the rest of the movie’s airy whimsy. When a tragic accident strikes late into the film, her emotional collapse feels piercingly real despite the fabulosity surrounding her. Plus, the comic ridiculousness, as repetitive as it may grow, of her sexual rampage with the wicker man feels singularly like something only Colman could sell.

You might wish that “Wicker” had spent more time with the other villagers it weaves into the frames, whether Dinklage’s hovel-dwelling basket wizard, Máté Mészáros’ local drunkard, or Gustav Lindh’s lithe and undersexed bottlewasher. But you have to commend the filmmakers — on their second outing after 2020’s somewhat twee science-fiction outing “Save Yourselves!” — for widening the berth for so many characters in such feature-length time. Crawley’s images, too, elevate what could have been schlocky material (and what of someone like Chaucer or Edmund Spenser, great perverted English writers whom this movie homages, wasn’t working in schlock?) into a quirkfest gilded with prestigious trappings.

At the fibrous heart of the movie, though, is Skarsgård as a taciturn man made of wood whose soul is hardly made of such, and a relationship you root for opposite Colman’s emotionally twisty turn. “Wicker” threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.

Grade: B

“Wicker” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.