In Wicker, Olivia Colman plays an unloved fisherwoman who asks Peter Dinklage, a magically endowed basket-maker, to weave her a husband. The Wicker Husband is stoic yet pliable, a dutiful force of nature in bed or with a hammer, and as tall and handsome as the tree he's made from. The women of the village stare with lust as he walks creakily by. There was really only one option when casting this creature, and luckily, the producers of this sly, saucy fable got their man.

Professional hot Viking Alexander Skarsgård is an expert at sending up or subverting his own studly image while also completely embodying it. In 2025's brilliant S&M romance Pillion, he deftly exposed the emotional weakness of a strapping, leather-clad biker dom. In Wicker, he achieves something similar but more tender, which is all the more remarkable for being summoned from somewhere within a truly amazing assemblage of practical and digital creature effects.

Wicker, written and directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, is set in a fairy-tale village that seems to exist somewhere between the Middle Ages and the late Victorian period. The villagers, played by a ruthlessly skilled team of British comic actors, speak in a mixture of dirty jokes and strangely mannered aphorisms — in other words, like fairy-tale characters. They have no names and refer to each other by their archetypal roles in the little society: Butcher, Doctor, Baker, Innkeeper, Tailor's Wife. Colman's rude, stinky, and unmarried Fisherwoman is the only woman who owns her own title rather than taking it from her husband.

Source link