Wicker review: Skarsgård's sexy basket man is the year's oddest charmer

A lonely fisherwoman orders a husband made of wicker. That's the whole pitch, and against all odds, it works.

Wicker is the oddest romance of the year and one of the most charming: a bawdy medieval fairy tale with real heart, carried by Olivia Colman and a startlingly lovable Alexander Skarsgård. It runs out of road before the end, but it earns a solid 7 out of 10.

Colman plays the Fisherwoman, the smelly, scruffy, fiercely independent outcast of a small farming village. When she asks the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband, he weaves her Skarsgård: a man made of wicker who turns out to be very close to perfect. The village does not take it well.

Directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson adapted it from Ursula Wills-Jones's short story The Wicker Husband. Elizabeth Debicki, Richard E. Grant and Phil Daniels fill out the village.

It premiered at Sundance in January to two standing ovations, and critics have mostly fallen for it. It sits at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 149 reviews. Metacritic is cooler at 69, which tells you the love comes with reservations.

A husband worth weaving

The real surprise is Skarsgård. Buried under a body of woven wicker, he still manages to be funny, tender and, somehow, a heartthrob. He plays the husband as a dream version of a partner, all innocence and good intentions, and it's the innocence that makes him so strangely lovable.

The creature work helps enormously. The wicker never looks like a gimmick, and JoBlo's Alex Maidy called the makeup "some of the best visual effects of the year" (8/10).

Colman is the anchor. Her Fisherwoman is fiery and headstrong, then quietly vulnerable when the film slows down, and she sells every absurd beat with a straight face. The Times' Kevin Maher wrote that she "is so good that she single-handedly elevates this 'quirky medieval romp' into unexpected, even undeserved, places."

Dinklage is the wise, faintly magical Basket Weaver who guides the story and anchors its ending, and Debicki has a ball as the village's answer to a wicked stepmother.

It's frank about sex, too, with an R rating for sexual content and brief full nudity, and most of its laughs are salty ones. Underneath, it has something sharp to say about what people want from a partner, and about a village that can't stand to see an outcast happy.

The Hollywood Reporter's Richard Lawson called it "a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles."

Where it loses the thread

The trouble is length. At 105 minutes, Wicker stretches what is really a short story's worth of idea, and the middle sags while the village catches up with what the audience already knows.

IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio named the problem and forgave it in the same breath: "Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander…but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be."

The tone wobbles too, lurching between bawdy comedy, dark fantasy and romance. The Guardian's Benjamin Lee wasn't won over, calling it "a tonally uneven mix of mostly unfunny bawdy humour, dark fantasy and unlikely romance."

Variety's Peter Debruge was cooler still: "A fable is only as strong as its moral lesson, and while so many are rock solid, this one's made of wicker."

Audiences are far kinder than the doubters. They give it 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, and 92% of opening-weekend viewers polled by PostTrak were positive. Viewers have pitched it as Pinocchio meets The Shape of Water, and that's about right.

If you like your love stories strange, a little naughty and soft in the middle, this is your film. It's rated R and runs 105 minutes, and it's in US cinemas now, with the UK following on Friday, October 30. It doesn't need the biggest screen, but it plays best with a crowd that gasps in the right places.

Weird, warm and cheekier than it has any right to be, Wicker is a charmer. Just don't expect it to keep its shape all the way to the end.