The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.
The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki.
But the fisherwoman, showing a good deal more imagination than everyone else, boldly approaches the Basketmaker (a droll performance from Peter Dinklage) and commissions him to make a wicker husband for her; this wicker hunk, magicked up in a secret workshop, is played by Alexander Skarsgård. His soulful eyes look out attractively from that weird wicker face.
This new husband turns out to be an amazing catch: attentive, sensitive, non-toxically masculine, a wicker man of few words, great at fixing things in the cottage as he creaks self-effacingly around the place. (This is just as well as it’s still Colman who is earning a living for them both.) And above all, he is a wonderful lover; we don’t see his wicker genitals but there is evidently no problem with abrasion discomfort. (A movie more conventionally aware of comedy might have felt the need to explain this away a little more.)
Instantly, the fisherwoman’s domestic bliss triggers poisonous envy among the sex-starved villagers, especially that noisome tailor’s wife. And it leads to an almost disquieting (and certainly amusing) climax of dismay.
