{"id":660465,"date":"2026-10-29T08:38:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T08:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660465\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T08:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T08:38:10","slug":"wicker-review-olivia-colman-finds-the-perfect-lover-in-intriguing-folk-horror-romance-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660465\/","title":{"rendered":"Wicker review \u2013 Olivia Colman finds the perfect lover in intriguing folk-horror romance | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 Skarsg\u00e5rd<\/a>. His soulful eyes look out attractively from that weird wicker face.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s still Colman who is earning a living for them both.) And above all, he is a wonderful lover; we don\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n

Instantly, the fisherwoman\u2019s domestic bliss triggers poisonous envy among the sex-starved villagers, especially that noisome tailor\u2019s wife. And it leads to an almost disquieting (and certainly amusing) climax of dismay.<\/p>\n

Wicker is out on 23 October in the US, on 30 October in the UK and 5 November in Australia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-660465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}