Olivia Colman commissions a husband from Peter Dinklage’s basket weaver, Alexander Skarsgård arrives in the basket — and a Sundance fairy tale for adults earns every bit of its glow.
Every Wicker review has to start with the premise, because the premise sounds like a dare. In a medieval seaside village, a fisherwoman who has spent years as the target of jokes about her unmarried life finally snaps and commissions the local basket weaver to build her a husband out of wicker. He does. The husband comes to life. And he is — attentive, loyal, soulful, spectacular — better at marriage than any flesh-and-blood man in the village, which is where the trouble starts. Wicker, from writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, adapts Ursula Wills-Jones’ short story “The Wicker Husband,” premiered at Sundance on Jan. 24, 2026, and opened in U.S. theaters Oct. 23 through Black Bear. It runs 105 minutes, is rated R, and arrives carrying a 92% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. Having now seen what the fuss is about: the score is earned.
Colman and Skarsgård sell the impossible
The whole film balances on Olivia Colman, and she never wobbles. Her Fisherwoman — the character has no name, which is its own quiet statement — is not a lonely-heart cliché. She is self-sufficient, funny, and furious at a village that treats her independence as a defect, and Colman lets you see the exact moment mockery curdles into a wound she decides to answer. Screen Daily singled out the performance’s flickering insecurity beneath the defiance, and it is the engine of every scene that follows: this is a woman who ordered a husband as a joke at the village’s expense and then has to learn, in public, how to actually be loved.
Alexander Skarsgård has the stranger job and aces it. The Wicker Husband is a practical creation — a full-body build from Wētā Workshop, all creaks and woven texture — and Skarsgård plays him with rudimentary knowledge of the world and bottomless devotion, developing insecurities of his own as the village turns on the marriage. Around them, the ensemble is stacked: Peter Dinklage as the Basket Weaver, Elizabeth Debicki bringing controlled cruelty as the Tailor’s Wife, Nabhaan Rizwan as the Tailor, Marli Siu as her sister, and Richard E. Grant, far too briefly, as the village doctor.
A Wicker review of the argument around it
The critical divide is about tone, and both sides have a case. The Hollywood Reporter’s Richard Lawson called it “a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure” with “a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect,” and Variety’s Peter Debruge praised its irreverent spin on a suddenly relevant allegory about falling in love with a nonhuman partner. IndieWire graded it a B, warning it can feel like a logline stretched to feature length while conceding the actors are “irresistibly weird and wonderful.” The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee went the other way entirely — two stars, “too much wood but not enough fire,” and a tonally uneven mix of bawdy humor, dark fantasy and romance.
This desk lands with Lawson. Yes, the bawdy jokes repeat themselves, and the village’s moral reckoning takes its time. But Lol Crawley’s photography and Anna Meredith’s jaunty score keep the fairy tale tactile — slate, hay and woven fiber instead of plastic fantasy gloss — and the film’s real subject sneaks up on you: a community that would rather destroy an unconventional happiness than examine its own marriages. The laughter is real. So is the ache underneath it.
Verdict: ★★★★ out of 5 — a strange, sensual, surprisingly moving fairy tale for adults, anchored by two fearless lead performances and the best practical creature work of the year.
Oscar worthy: Yes. Colman gives exactly the kind of technically fearless, funny-sad performance the Academy claims to reward, and the Wētā Workshop husband is a production-design and costume showcase that deserves to hear its name read out — if voters can get past the premise, this is a real contender below the line and a live one for its star.
The 247 Take — Every year Sundance produces one film whose logline sounds like a prank and whose execution makes programmers look like prophets. Wicker is 2026’s. It is a movie about a woman who builds the perfect man and a village that cannot forgive her for it, and it understands something most romances don’t: the scandal was never the wicker. It was the happiness.
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Sources: Indy100 (critical roundup: Rotten Tomatoes 92%, THR’s Richard Lawson, The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee, Variety’s Peter Debruge, IndieWire’s B grade, Screen Daily on Colman) | InBetweenDrafts (Anna Meredith’s score, the production design, select theaters Oct. 23) | Reviews and Dunn (plot and cast: Colman, Skarsgård, Dinklage, Debicki) | Fanversation (the Wētā Workshop build and the Sundance premiere)
