Olivia Colman stands beside a basket man with woven abdominal muscles and raffia hair, and somehow she looks like the sensible one.

That image alone should sell Wicker. Colman plays a grubby fisherwoman who lives beyond the edge of a medieval seaside village, smelling of her trade and perfectly aware of what the locals say about her. When their fixation on marriage becomes unbearable, she asks a basketmaker to weave her a husband. He obliges. The finished man looks like Alexander Skarsgård because fairy tales occasionally reward excellent decision-making.

Directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer have handed Colman the kind of romantic lead she has always seemed destined to play. Their heroine is coarse, lonely, stubborn, funny and old enough to know that respectability is usually a bargain struck in someone else’s favour. Her great love story arrives with wicker nipples.

Honestly, it is about time.

Colman Has Always Understood Strange Desire

Colman can make desire look embarrassing without draining it of dignity. That may be her secret weapon.

Her face holds several reactions at once. Pleasure can arrive with suspicion. Hurt can appear beneath a joke and vanish before anybody offers comfort. She has a remarkable gift for showing characters who want something fiercely while feeling faintly appalled that anybody might notice.

That tension has followed her through wildly different roles. Queen Anne in The Favourite turned neediness into a form of royal weather. Leda in The Lost Daughter carried maternal ambivalence like a private fever. Sarah in Tyrannosaur hid terror beneath domestic politeness. Even her cheerier characters often have a little ache tucked behind the smile.

Wicker gives that familiar ache somewhere gloriously peculiar to go.

The Fisherwoman lives in a village where women are valued through marriage and weddings involve metal collars. She has already been sorted into the category reserved for undesirable women. She smells, works, and lives alone. Her neighbours regard these facts as a complete moral biography.

Colman is exactly the actor you want in that position. She can register humiliation without making the Fisherwoman pitiable. One sour glance from her can tell us that loneliness hurts and the villagers remain tedious. Both truths get to survive.

A Romantic Heroine With Mud on Her Hem

Screen romance still has a strange cleanliness problem. Its women are permitted eccentricity when the eccentricity looks charming in a trailer. They bake badly in an attractive kitchen and wear mismatched socks. They trip while carrying folders.

The Fisherwoman brings actual fish.

She occupies the grubby end of the fairy tale. Her clothes belong to somebody who works beside cold water. Her face has been left alone by the village beauty regime. She has a monobrow, a sharp tongue and little interest in making rejection comfortable for the people rejecting her.

That makes the romance feel more thrilling. Colman gets to play a woman whose desirability emerges from her whole unruly presence. The joke never needs her to transform into a polished village beauty. The magic supplies a man capable of seeing what was already there.

There is something wonderfully rude about that setup. The community has spent years treating the Fisherwoman as surplus. Then she returns with a towering handcrafted husband who adores her, satisfies her and apparently repairs the bed after breaking it. Suddenly everyone develops an interest in her domestic arrangements.

Alexander Skarsgård Makes a Surprisingly Good Basket

Skarsgård has built a career out of beauty that feels faintly dangerous. He can play a vampire, a Viking or a charismatic monster and make physical perfection look like a warning from nature. Wicker turns that quality inside out.

His Wicker Husband is huge, handsome and morally uncomplicated. He has been constructed for devotion. The role places a performer associated with menace inside an elaborate Weta Workshop suit and asks him to become tender.

The practical costume matters. Colman has a real body to look at, touch and react to. Skarsgård’s woven brow can furrow. His rigid face still catches feeling. He occupies the room as a creature instead of a visual effect waiting to be added later.

It also makes the sex comedy much funnier. A computer-generated lover could become sleek very quickly. This man has texture. He looks flammable. Every embrace raises minor logistical concerns.

Yet the attraction has to remain sincere or the entire film collapses into a sketch. Colman gives it conviction. She looks at this enormous woven oddity with the startled concentration of a woman trying to decide whether happiness has finally arrived or whether she has inhaled too much river fog.

Then she swoons.

Fair enough.

The Gothic Suits Her Beautifully

Wicker has the bones of an old folk tale and the appetite of a bawdy pub story. Its thatched village feels handmade. Trades replace names. Rituals carry the weight of law. Magic enters through labour as Peter Dinklage’s Basketmaker turns reeds and craft into a living husband.

That tactile world suits Colman far better than a glossy romantic comedy ever could. She belongs among damp riverbanks, odd customs and villagers who know far too much about one another. Her emotional naturalism keeps the setting from floating away into decorative whimsy.

She also brings an essential pinch of darkness. A husband made to order sounds delightful until you wonder what it means to manufacture the perfect partner. Love becomes tangled with ownership, fantasy and control. The village’s marriages already treat women as property. The Fisherwoman answers that system by commissioning a man expressly for herself.

That reversal has bite.

Colman can play the wish fulfilment and its uncomfortable shadow in the same look. She understands that getting exactly what you asked for can be frightening. Fairy tales have always known this. So has she.

The Villagers Fear a Satisfied Woman

The Wicker Husband does more than improve one woman’s life. He becomes an accusation aimed at every mediocre man in town.

He listens, he’s gentle, and he takes pleasure seriously. His existence exposes how little the human husbands have been offering while expecting gratitude in return. The Fisherwoman’s happiness becomes politically inconvenient.

Elizabeth Debicki’s Tailor’s Wife appears to recognise the threat. Her status depends on the village continuing to function as it always has, even when that order gives men the softest seats. The conflict grows from something sharper than jealousy. One woman’s freedom makes every other compromise visible.

This is fertile territory for Colman. She excels at characters whose private feelings become public trouble. Her Fisherwoman never sets out to lead a revolution. She wants a husband who treats her well and perhaps a bed sturdy enough to survive him. The village supplies the revolution by deciding her pleasure requires containment.

A Love Story Built for Olivia Colman

Plenty of performers could sell the comedy of Wicker. Colman can sell the yearning beneath it.

She has never needed conventional glamour to command romantic attention. Her appeal comes through intelligence, warmth and the feeling that another thought is always flickering behind her eyes. She makes affection look risky because her characters understand its price.

Here, that quality meets a story willing to be filthy, tender and visually absurd. The Fisherwoman gets no makeover and offers no apology. Her fantasy man arrives as a magnificently impractical piece of craftsmanship. Their romance upsets the local order because happiness has made her harder to shame.

After years of watching Colman play wives starved of affection, queens poisoned by it and mothers frightened by its demands, seeing her adored by a beautiful basket feels strangely restorative.

Give her the damp cottage and the rude villagers. Give her Skarsgård in woven body armour.

Olivia Colman has earned her gothic fairy tale, and naturally it comes with splinters.