Take one fishing village of no fixed century, a bride who smells of the water, a basketmaker who asks no questions, and a husband built in New Zealand out of cane, and you have, more or less exactly, Wicker. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s second feature, after the sci-fi comedy Save Yourselves!, premiered at Sundance in January, was picked up there by Black Bear, and reached American screens on October 23 with the sort of buzz Punch Drunk Critics describes well: spoken about steadily but quietly for nine months, until the autumn festivals turned the murmur into noise. I came to it for the same reason the cinematography forums will: a lead character who is a practical build, mostly, from Wētā Workshop, and who has to carry a romantic comedy without, by the nature of his material, being able to move very much.
The constraint is the casting
Every film in this tier is defined by one limitation it chose, and here the choice is in the title. The Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman, all appetite and no self-pity) commissions a husband from the Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage, with what Close-Up Culture calls a wonderfully rhythmic quality, in a part that is small and load-bearing), and what the Basketmaker delivers is Alexander Skarsgård inside a body of woven wicker that the production, by Punch Drunk Critics’ account, built as a practical effect rather than painting on later. Think through what that decides before a frame is shot. Cane does not flex at the hip. A face of it cannot do the small things a romantic lead’s face is paid to do. So the performance has to be built out of stillness and delivery, and Close-Up Culture gives the result its due with a phrase I wish I had written: a wonderfully wooden performance, stiff movements and earnest lines making him as endearing as he is sexy. AwardsBuzz says the same from another angle, measured and slightly robotic, in the best way.
That is the one-rule constraint doing its proper work. A digital husband could have bent and smiled and flirted, and the joke would have died in the first reel, because the premise only holds if the man is visibly a made thing whose devotion is total precisely because it is simple. The directors took the hard road and the hard road is the point. Prosthetic designer Joe Dunckley’s build, per AwardsBuzz, is detailed enough that the character reads as real as the actors around him who are merely wearing makeup and costume, and the film, sensibly, does not spend long dissecting the body; what it shows is emphatic and leaves the rest to the imagination. Bien sûr, the imagination is where a fable keeps its budget.
Then there are the love scenes, which the trailer coverage calls interesting to shoot, a phrase every chef op will translate without help. I have lit bedroom scenes with far less in the way, and each one was a negotiation over where the camera may not go. Add a leading man whose torso is cane that must read as flesh in close-up, and whose nipples, Skarsgård told Entertainment Weekly with evident pride, were made of wicker by the brilliant artists in New Zealand, and you have a shooting day I would not have envied anyone. The reviews say the scenes play as both passionate and funny, bed broken and then repaired by the same husband, which tells me the blocking solved it with comedy rather than concealment. That is the right solution and the cheaper one.
A fable that refuses to explain itself
The second rule the film sets itself is older than cinema: the magic is not explained. AwardsBuzz puts it precisely, the husband’s creation requires no explanation beyond the fact that, in this world, it is possible because someone thought to ask. Chris Deacy, who saw the film twice on consecutive nights at mystery screenings and is otherwise delighted, wishes it had gone further into the philosophy, whether the wicker man has a soul, whether he can love, whether a partner built to please can be an equal. Those are good questions and I am glad the film left them in the lobby. Answer them and you owe exposition, probably a scene with the Basketmaker, probably effects to show the mechanism, and you have traded a fable for a science-fiction film with a smaller budget than its premise now requires. Deacy half-concedes this himself: fairy tales do not have to explain their magic. N’est-ce pas.
What the film does explain, thoroughly, is the village. People are named by their trades. Brides wear a collar at the wedding to signify the fidelity expected of them. An egg thrown at a wedding foretells a marriage, and the Fisherwoman chuckles when she catches one by mistake. Into this walks a husband who cooks, mends, treats his wife as an equal and is, by every account, superb in bed, and Deacy’s reading of the satire is the one I would defend: the wicker man is not trying to change anything, he is merely being a decent husband, and in this community that is close to a revolutionary act. The men feel the threat; the women see what they have been missing. The Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki, the sharpest thing in the film, a mind too large for her life and too self-regarding to use it well) takes it upon herself to restore the order, and Close-Up Culture notes how her edge cuts gradually through a polite Yorkshire accent. Richard E. Grant as her useless doctor father and Phil Daniels as a butcher who speaks only in innuendo supply the rotten crudeness the central tenderness is played against, and the contrast is the engine of the comedy.
The debt
Close-Up Culture is the dissenting voice on structure and I think the critic is right. A dark revelation about the Tailor’s Wife hints at a more sinister film under the whimsy, and then the third act takes what the review calls a tame and predictable path, a victim of its own clear-cut morality, with a climax that does not do justice to the couple. This is the standard failure of the adult fairy tale: the form’s moral clarity, which is its strength for eighty minutes, becomes a cage in the last twenty, because the villagers must be punished and the lovers vindicated and everyone can see it coming. AwardsBuzz reaches for Judy & Punch as a tonal cousin and Deacy for Edward Scissorhands, and both comparisons carry the same warning: the artificial innocent among the townsfolk is a story that knows its ending too well.
The verdict
It earns most of what it attempts. The build is the right build, practical and unexplained; the performance it forces out of Skarsgård is a real piece of acting rather than a suit doing the work; Colman gives the film a heart that the reviews unanimously credit, and Debicki gives it teeth. Where it falls short is where this form always does, in a last act that pays its moral debts too neatly. I would still send any director planning a creature lead to see it, for one lesson above the others: when the monster is your romantic hero, the build is not an effect, it is a casting decision, and it determines how the actor can move before he has read a line.
What it took
A second feature for a writing and directing couple, adapted from Ursula Wills’s short story, with the lead creature built as a practical prosthetic by Wētā Workshop in New Zealand under prosthetic designer Joe Dunckley. A recast along the way: Dev Patel was originally in the wicker role before having to leave it. A Sundance 2026 premiere in the Premieres section, an acquisition there by Black Bear Pictures, and a US release on October 23, 2026 in select theaters, going wide a week later, rated R at 105 minutes. The transferable item: budget the creature as a principal, with the actor’s prep time attached to the build schedule, not as a line in the effects column.
Some of my notes for this one come from the Sundance notice at AwardsBuzz, the reviews by Chris Deacy and at Close-Up Culture, Punch Drunk Critics’ trailer coverage, and the Next Best Picture podcast’s notes on its interviews with the cast and the Wētā crew.