Wicker: What You Can Love Within Its Limits
Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer's Wicker begins with a strange premise. A lonely fisherwoman commissions a husband made from wicker. Not metaphorically. Actually wicker. And the film takes this seriously.
The genius of the premise is that the wicker husband can't be escaped into symbol. He's brutally literal. Alexander Skarsgård inhabits this figure with real commitment. His movements are careful, deliberate. The material is fragile. Touch risks damage. This fragility becomes the film's emotional architecture. He can't hold her without the possibility of splintering. His existence as wicker never transforms into something else. He just is what he is.
Olivia Colman plays the fisherwoman as someone who has learned solitude so thoroughly that another consciousness arriving—even one made of wicker—unsettles her entire existence. Her face communicates longing and terror in equal measure. When she touches him, her hands show the violence of contact. Genuine closeness involves real risk.
Lol Crawley shot this. He won an Oscar for The Brutalist. Here he works with restraint. The Scottish coastal landscapes don't perform beauty. They're extensions of interior emotional states. Light emanates from unexpected places. The texture of wicker becomes central to how the film shows connection and distance simultaneously. Production designer Renátó Cseh creates interior space that contains the impossible figure without pretending he's anything but what he is.
Peter Dinklage appears as someone from her past, which complicates the emotional logic. The film occasionally seems uncertain whether it's tracking toward romance or tragedy. These moments unsettle the tonal coherence. But they also deepen the thematic work.
The film's central assertion refuses sentimentality: desire is always an act of construction. We build our lovers from available materials. Love is bounded by what people actually are. The wicker husband doesn't metaphorically become real. He stays wicker. The loneliness never ends. Connection doesn't erase the fundamental distance between separate beings. Yet within these limits, affection is possible. Genuine. Unbearably present.
What's striking about Wicker is its commitment to strangeness. It doesn't make things easy. The tonal complexity occasionally exceeds the narrative's grasp. But the film never compromises the essential oddness of its vision. Two creatures learning to exist in proximity. One made of wicker. Both fundamentally alone. The emotional accuracy of that paradox—that's the work here.
It's rare to watch something this genuinely strange executed with this much formal care.