OVERVIEW
Wicker is a spellbinding romance about a fisherwoman living in a judgmental village who, after being mocked, asks a magician to build her a husband. One month later, a mysterious man comes knocking on doors looking for her so they can get married, with one caveat: he is a literal wicker figure dressed in a suit. He is also extremely sweet and kind, which challenges the village’s rules and the way its people treat one another.
BACKGROUND
The film adapts the self-published short story fable “The Wicker Husband” by Ursula Wills-Jones, which later found a second life as a stage musical but has otherwise remained fairly niche. It marks the second feature and second Sundance appearance for the couple Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who again use a high-concept premise to skewer the small social rules people hide behind. The filmmakers also kept the title character as practical as possible, arguing the film would not work without real makeup effects, and brought in New Zealand’s Weta Workshop to create a design that supports Alexander Skarsgård’s performance.
EXECUTION
This is a delightful film that earns a smile from the very first minute, instantly setting the tone with irreverent dialogue about a just-caught fish. It has a unique, likable atmosphere, and its fable-like world feels oddly intricate. It even recalls Dogville in its theatrical artificiality and portrait of a small community with strict rules, all played earnestly enough that the stripped-down construction becomes the point.
Everyone is named after what they do, so you have the Fisherwoman, the Baker, the Tailor, and so on. Interestingly, aside from the Fisherwoman, the women are named after the men they married (Tailor’s wife). People are sorted, labeled, and kept in line through daily routine, gossip, and public shaming. The Fisherwoman, played by Olivia Colman with a monobrow, is the ugly duckling.
The film never treats this like a cute quirk. Even with an absurd premise, the emotions stay genuine. That is why the arrival of the Wicker Husband, and his different definition of love, truly shakes the village. Suddenly, the rules they built their lives around stop making sense. If that is true, what exactly have they been sacrificing for?
It shows how tradition breeds hypocrisy, which pushes the community toward collapse. Beneath the rituals are people who can’t say what they feel and mostly live selfishly, so they punish each other and compete instead. Even the Fisherwoman isn’t immune to it: she wants a husband because that is the currency of belonging here, and when she later takes a radical action, it feels like the logical result of years under those rules.
Olivia Colman, as expected, is fantastic at grounding the character and adding depth through small looks that hint at the hardships of her upbringing. Her conversations with the Wicker Husband, where she slowly opens up, are genuinely touching, especially when she says her heart is flammable.
And while the Wicker Husband’s love can feel a little one-dimensional, it might have played with more texture if he showed even a flicker of hesitation at one key moment when forgiveness is on the table. Still, Alexander Skarsgård makes it work, letting emotion come through layers of makeup while also landing some perfectly timed, deadpan laughs. Peter Dinklage and Elizabeth Debicki give memorable supporting performances and, like the rest of the cast, fully nail the film’s tone. Debicki, in particular, somehow earns our sympathy for a character who is, by any reasonable standard, a deplorable human being.
The film’s sense of humor is sharp, and the jokes, some of them dark, land beautifully. It is full of creative touches, like the collars women must wear at their weddings, the oddly specific dance choreography, or the doctor’s unnerving competence, and every character is bursting with personality. When it shifts into emotional beats, it can melt your heart or break it. The best scenes are the ones that do both at once, like the running jokes involving the broken bed, summed up in the exchange: “She is happy, then the bed needs fixing.”
Technically, the film is a treat, especially the makeup effects. With light VFX support (mostly to give the wicker husband a slightly translucent quality), the design team pulls off something impressive, making him feel so real and tactile that the village’s fixation makes perfect sense. The build-up to his first appearance is also fantastic. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (The Brutalist), production designer Renátó Cseh, and composer Anna Meredith all help create a world that feels equally classical and modern.
AFTERTASTE
Wicker is a big winner in the Sundance 2026 line-up. Full of life and humor, it tells its heartwarming story with confidence within a well-crafted, fantastical world, anchored by genuinely great performances and makeup effects that deserve serious award attention. Now all we need are more wicker husbands and Fisherwomen in this world.