Friday, October 16, 2026
Wicker
What if the perfect husband came with a warning label: fragile, flammable, and made of wicker? In their second feature, "Wicker" (USA/UK 2026 | 105 min.), writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson turn an unconventional marriage into a sharp comic fable about desire, social conformity, and the perils of being different.
Their debut, "Save Yourselves!" (2020), sent a Brooklyn couple into an alien invasion. Here, the outsider is a fisherwoman who wants a husband of her own choosing. The Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) lives on the outskirts of a seaside village, earns her living independently, and puts up with the locals' condescending remarks. At a wedding reception, she discovers that she is expected to marry next. The Tailor's Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), the village matriarch, magnanimously assures her that there is no shame in remaining single. The backhanded kindness only strengthens the Fisherwoman's resolve to find a husband.
She takes her money to the village Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) and commissions him to make one. A month later, he delivers the Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård), a handsome, gentle man whose woven exterior conceals a thoughtful personality. The two marry, and their wedding night ends with a bed that cannot withstand their enthusiasm. It is a fitting introduction to a film that finds comedy in the collision between an unconventional body and conventional expectations.
At first, the villagers regard the Wicker Husband as an unnatural monstrosity. Their disgust turns to envy when they realize that the Fisherwoman has found happiness with a partner who treats her as an equal. The community's moral outrage quickly gives way to self-interest, with some residents plotting to get their hands on the husband for themselves. The incompetent Village Doctor (Richard E. Grant) adds another dose of absurdity, while the Basketmaker has his own plans for the creation he has brought into the world. In this village, a marriage that harms no one becomes a threat simply because it refuses to follow the rules.
The film's most distinctive achievement is that its central oddity is not merely a digital trick. New Zealand's Wētā Workshop spent 18 months researching and developing a way to turn woven wicker into a convincing human form. Since prosthetic makeup must stretch and compress like skin, the team had to devise a different approach. It created physical weaving samples, then combined digital sculpting with 3D printing to produce the woven components directly. About 95 percent of the prosthetic makeup and most of the suit were 3D printed. The face alone requires ten separate appliances, and applying the complete makeup and suit takes roughly 90 minutes.
That painstaking construction gives the performers a tangible presence to work with. Colman, who won an Oscar for "The Favourite" (2018), also serves as a producer. Her scenes with Skarsgård play out opposite an actual performer in a physical suit, rather than a character inserted during postproduction. The distinction matters: the Wicker Husband occupies the same space as the people who fear him, covet him, or simply cannot accept him. The practical creation makes their reactions more immediate and lends the film's fantastical premise a persuasive physical presence.
Yet the elaborate craftsmanship is more than a technical showcase. The Wicker Husband's appeal lies in his decency, not his novelty. He offers the Fisherwoman something the village's supposedly respectable men cannot: a relationship free of the social calculations that govern its marriages. The joke is that the man everyone considers unnatural may be the most humane person in town. The film's satire works best when it lets that contradiction speak for itself, exposing how quickly tradition becomes an excuse for prejudice and how readily disapproval turns into greed.
Premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, "Wicker" earned warm reviews, and its trailer went viral in August 2026. The premise might sound like an extended punchline, but Fischer and Wilson build a full comic fable around it. Their film asks who gets to define a proper marriage, what makes someone a desirable partner, and why a community so invested in respectability becomes so eager to exploit anything it cannot understand. The answers arrive wrapped in woven reeds, with a sense of humor that is considerably less brittle than the bed on the wedding night.
"Wicker" opens in theaters on October 23, 2026.
