{"id":263969,"date":"2026-01-26T00:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T00:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/263969\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T00:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T00:44:09","slug":"olivia-colman-and-alexander-skarsgard-in-bawdy-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/263969\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard in Bawdy Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

A kooky sex-crazed folk tale in search of a larger purpose beyond its whimsical premise, Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer\u2019s \u201cWicker\u201d stars Olivia Colman<\/a> as a prickly fisherwoman who emerges from the fringes of a seaside village to task a basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) with weaving her a husband. That husband is played by a delightfully deadpan Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd as a man made entirely of wicker fibers, a face that looks like a woven espadrille stretched over a human skull. <\/p>\n

This raunchy period romp arrives in spirit of Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s for-its-time X-rated \u201cCanterbury Tales\u201d and with an A24-ready, Academy-ratioed crisp visual style serviced by cinematographer Lol Crawley (\u201cThe Brutalist\u201d). Sure, the premise \u2014 originating from a story called \u201cThe Wicker Husband\u201d by Ursula Wills-Jones \u2014 is a novel one destined to grab attention. But that gets a bit lost in the cast of characters the filmmakers pack into the story, an ensemble of hysterically horny villagers beset by a seeming spell of sexual frustration, and for whom the arrival of this wicker man, played by Skarsg\u00e5rd, upends all their days and ways, tickling their hearts and loins.<\/p>\n

\"Alex<\/a> \"PARK<\/a> <\/p>\n

Colman\u2019s fisherwoman is largely derided by the villagers for her inside-and-out smelly disposition and crabby countenance, but she keeps the settlement in foodstuff, bringing slimy fish acquired from the nearby river daily to the townsfolk. \u201cWicker\u201d is a period film<\/a> with no specific period to call its own, though you could clock its setting as somewhere in the 1800s. Or 1600s. Whatever; this is not your mother\u2019s olden-times cinematic fable. Those unnamed villagers include a tailor (Nabhaan Rizwan), his miserable tradwife (Elizabeth Debicki, radiantly beautiful and magnetic onscreen), her prudish sister (Marli Siu), a wildly incompetent doctor (Richard E. Grant), and many more. <\/p>\n

Wilson and Huston Fischer\u2019s film cuts away from the central action involving Colman and Skarsg\u00e5rd to make space for these other individual stories, even as some get washed away in the sameness of their shared suffering. Flesh wounds, fetid moppets, breastmilk-leaking nipples, and sudden gushes of blood make for a Monty Python-style of ribald humor that will alienate and enchant in equal measure.<\/p>\n

\u201cWicker\u201d is at its most naughtily hilarious, however, in the outrageous lovemaking between Colman and Skarsg\u00e5rd. She\u2019s an embittered spinster long overdue for a roll in the hay (or, in this case, with the hay) who lustily slobs on her new husband\u2019s log. (Such puns are par for the course in a screenplay that even employs \u201cgagging\u201d in its modernly outfitted parlance.) And literally, while it\u2019s kept offscreen, the nifty sound design created by Andy Neil allows us to hear the wicker husband\u2019s, uh, growing tumescence that enables him to vigorously rail his fisherwoman wife into squeams and squirms of overwhelming ecstasy. So much so that a bed is broken, and it\u2019s one he\u2019s, who knew, equipped to fix. Husband material, indeed. The lore of how such a wicker man is created, and whether or not he can conceive, or whether or not his sex might be potentially painful given that it\u2019s literally wrought out of coarse natural fibers, isn\u2019t explained so much as it is not the primary interest of the director\/screenwriting pair.<\/p>\n

Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd starring in a period fable as a piece of fuckable furniture might not have been top of mind in terms of what you\u2019re expecting from the actor who has recently done such brilliant work in \u201cSuccession,\u201d \u201cPillion,\u201d and \u201cThe Moment<\/a>.\u201d But even as the tall Swedish actor is tasked with overembellishing given the prostheses he\u2019s bound behind opposite very real human actors, you emerge from \u201cWicker\u201d with the sense that no other actor could have played this creature, coolly soothing as a presence and an even romantic one, too.<\/p>\n

While Colman\u2019s recent stint of playing blowzy, socially alienating women onscreen (from \u201cThe Favourite\u201d to \u201cEmpire of Light\u201d) is starting to feel like an overcooked trope, she imbues the fisherwoman with grounded pathos that rises above the rest of the movie\u2019s airy whimsy. When a tragic accident strikes late into the film, her emotional collapse feels piercingly real despite the fabulosity surrounding her. Plus, the comic ridiculousness, as repetitive as it may grow, of her sexual rampage with the wicker man feels singularly like something only Colman could sell.<\/p>\n

You might wish that \u201cWicker\u201d had spent more time with the other villagers it weaves into the frames, whether Dinklage\u2019s hovel-dwelling basket wizard, M\u00e1t\u00e9 M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 local drunkard, or Gustav Lindh\u2019s lithe and undersexed bottlewasher. But you have to commend the filmmakers \u2014 on their second outing after 2020\u2019s somewhat twee science-fiction outing \u201cSave Yourselves!\u201d \u2014 for widening the berth for so many characters in such feature-length time. Crawley\u2019s images, too, elevate what could have been schlocky material (and what of someone like Chaucer or Edmund Spenser, great perverted English writers whom this movie homages, wasn\u2019t working in schlock?) into a quirkfest gilded with prestigious trappings.<\/p>\n

At the fibrous heart of the movie, though, is Skarsg\u00e5rd as a taciturn man made of wood whose soul is hardly made of such, and a relationship you root for opposite Colman\u2019s emotionally twisty turn. \u201cWicker\u201d threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.<\/p>\n

Grade: B<\/p>\n

\u201cWicker\u201d premiered at the 2026 Sundance<\/a> Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

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