Olivia Colman commissions herself the perfect husband in a fable about loneliness, longing, and being seen. We caught it at FEST Belgrade ahead of its wider release.
★★★★½
Wicker arrives trailing a reputation that does it a disservice, sold in whispers and clips as the year's great provocation, the film the internet has been daring each other to see, and if you walk in expecting only that you will spend the first twenty minutes feeling very clever and the remaining ninety realising you misjudged it entirely. Because beneath the premise that launched a thousand breathless posts, a lonely fisherwoman commissioning a husband woven for her by the village basketmaker, is something far more delicate and far more human than its marketing has any interest in telling you, a film that uses its own outrageousness as a kind of Trojan horse to smuggle in a story about grief, isolation, and the terrifying vulnerability of finally letting yourself be cared for.
The film belongs, completely and unquestionably, to Olivia Colman, who does not so much play this woman as dissolve into her, until you forget there is a performance happening at all and start to feel as though you have wandered into a documentary about a real person's life. It is the kind of acting that has no visible seams, all of it carried in the set of her shoulders and the flicker behind her eyes, and there is an early moment, small enough that a lesser film might have thrown it away, when her new husband offers to fix something around the home without being asked, and Colman lets a lifetime of doing everything alone pass across her face in the space of a single look, surprise and suspicion and relief all tangled together. If you have ever been the person who holds everything up by yourself, that look will find you where you live.
Opposite her, Alexander Skarsgård commits to a genuinely startling physical transformation as the wicker husband, a role that could so easily have tipped into novelty and instead becomes the film's beating, impossible heart, tender and uncanny in equal measure. The whole ensemble around them is deep with talent, Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu and Nabhaan Rizwan among them, and directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, adapting Ursula Wills's short story The Wicker Husband, direct the whole thing with a confidence of tone that is harder to pull off than it looks, holding comedy and sorrow in the same frame without ever letting one cancel the other out.
What surprised us most is how sharp the film is underneath its softness, how cleanly it turns into a story about a community whose true nature comes spilling out the moment desire enters the room, and about the way a village will punish a woman for wanting something more than the bare minimum she has been told to be grateful for. There is a comedy of hypocrisy running through all of it that is laugh-out-loud funny in places, but it is always in service of something that aches, and the film keeps circling back to a single, devastating idea about where love actually comes from and who we become when someone finally offers us kindness. We will say no more than that, because the pleasure of Wicker is in watching it reveal itself.
It is strange and quirky, and it will absolutely not be for everyone, but it is also one of the most unexpectedly moving things we have seen this festival, a film we were still turning over on the drive home and suspect we will be thinking about for a long while yet. Go in with an open mind, let it be as odd as it wants to be, and keep your eyes on the deeper thing underneath. You came for the spectacle. You will leave having been completely undone.
Wicker, four and a half stars.
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