Olivia Colman’s Fisherwoman asks for a husband and receives Alexander Skarsgård with woven abdominal muscles.
Some wishes arrive with suspiciously good customer service.
In Wicker, Peter Dinklage’s Basketmaker creates a spouse from willow for a woman mocked by her village. The finished man is tall, poetic and entirely devoted to her happiness. He listens and respects her work. He brings serious enthusiasm to the marital bed and apparently handles the repairs afterward.
The Wicker Husband qualifies as a dream man in the most literal sense. He has been manufactured from one woman’s desires, then delivered without the disappointing habits that ordinary husbands in the village treat as their birthright.
He is also hollow, flammable and vulnerable to damp.
Perfection always needs a little texture.
He Was Made for Her Alone
Most screen romances begin with two people colliding and discovering whether their lives can fit together. The Fisherwoman skips that exhausting stage. Her husband arrives already designed around her needs.
His existence contains no long history of bad relationships or inherited expectations. He has no mother hovering nearby with opinions about the state of the cottage and brings no grand ambition that requires his wife to shrink her life around it.
He enters the world with one clear purpose. Love her.
That makes the Wicker Husband an unusually pure romantic fantasy. He has none of the personal clutter that usually gives a partner the power to disappoint. His attention belongs completely to the woman who commissioned him.
The idea sounds blissful after watching the villagers treat the Fisherwoman as a social mistake. They mock her smell, appearance and unmarried life. Their marriages place metal collars around women’s necks. Affection seems to rank somewhere below obedience in the local vows.
Against that background, a purpose-built husband feels less eccentric than the available human options.
His Greatest Quality Is Attention
Skarsgård’s appearance supplies the immediate joke. Wētā Workshop gives him a heroic woven chest, a stern basket face and enough fibrous hair to worry any nearby candle.
Yet the character’s real appeal comes from the way he pays attention.
The Wicker Husband listens to his wife as though her words deserve time. His physical stillness makes that attention visible. He looks at her directly. He waits. His whole enormous body seems arranged around receiving whatever she wants to say.
That behaviour lands powerfully because the Fisherwoman has spent years being discussed rather than heard. The village knows her as a smell, an insult and a cautionary tale. People have converted her into a role while ignoring the person living inside it.
Her husband reverses the process. He sees the person first.
Colman makes that experience feel almost alarming. The Fisherwoman can answer hostility with a sharp tongue. Tenderness leaves her with fewer defences. Being noticed without ridicule requires a new kind of courage.
A handsome face may start the fantasy. Sustained attention completes it.
He Never Asks Her to Become Respectable
Romance often rewards an unconventional heroine after making her easier for society to accept. The hair comes down. The clothes improve. A collection of charming flaws receives a careful polish.
The Fisherwoman keeps the fish.
Her work remains part of her identity after marriage. She continues carrying the smell and roughness of a life built beside the water. The Wicker Husband joins that life rather than steering her toward the village’s approved version of womanhood.
This may be his dreamiest quality.
He desires her without asking for a revised edition. Her bluntness, age and independence arrive as part of the person he loves. The qualities that made her an outcast require no correction.
His acceptance also exposes the village’s cruelty. The neighbours treated her supposed undesirability as a fact of nature. Then a towering husband appears and gazes at her as though nature has finally got something right.
No makeover could embarrass them more effectively.
The Bed Breaking Matters More Than It First Appears
Wicker knows exactly what audiences will think when Skarsgård emerges with a body built like artisanal armour. The film does little to discourage those thoughts.
The Wicker Husband’s sexual devotion becomes village gossip. Beds suffer. Women become curious. Their husbands become defensive, which feels fair considering the competition now has braided pectorals.
The bawdy comedy carries a sharper point. The Fisherwoman’s pleasure matters to her husband.
Within a culture that treats marriage as female submission, his interest in her satisfaction changes the balance of the relationship. Sex becomes something she receives and enjoys rather than another duty attached to the collar.
His willingness to repair the bed afterward adds a perfect domestic flourish. He brings passion, then handles the practical consequences. Astonishing. The bar has fallen low enough for basic competence to look magical, but he clears it with room to spare.
The village men resent him because he creates a comparison they never agreed to face. He performs masculinity through care rather than control. His strength exists for intimacy, work and protection.
Also bed destruction. Nobody needs to be saintly about it.
Skarsgård Makes Goodness Feel Unusual
Alexander Skarsgård has played more than his share of dangerous men. His height and severe beauty arrive with built-in menace. He can stand quietly in a doorway and make everyone reconsider their evening plans.
The Wicker Husband uses that imposing presence differently. His size surrounds a gentle nature. The woven face suggests a folk-horror threat, while the man beneath it behaves with moral clarity.
Skarsgård has described the role’s goodness as intimidating. He usually finds conflict and darkness easier territory. Here, the character’s strangeness sits in his body rather than his intentions.
That gives the performance an appealing openness. Skarsgård resists treating sweetness as stupidity. The Wicker Husband may be new to human society, but he understands honesty and respect far better than the villagers do.
His sincerity also protects the premise from becoming a long sketch. A knowing wink would puncture the romance. Skarsgård commits to every tender look from beneath the prosthetics.
He plays a basket man with the emotional seriousness of Mr Darcy crossing a field.
A Perfect Partner Can Become a Mirror
The Wicker Husband offers everything the Fisherwoman believes she wants. That perfection carries an uneasy edge.
A partner built without independent needs risks becoming a flattering reflection. He can love without challenging the fantasy that produced him. Every act of devotion may reveal more about his maker’s desires than his own developing identity.
The film finds emotional tension inside that question. Being adored feels wonderful. Being known requires more.
The directors have spoken about relationships exposing parts of ourselves we would rather hide. A loving partner sees the defences along with the wounds beneath them. The Fisherwoman can commission a husband, but she cannot fully control what his attention reveals in her.
Her heart becomes the most flammable object in the cottage.
That vulnerability keeps the romance alive. A dream man who simply fulfils requests would grow dull. The Wicker Husband gains emotional weight when his presence asks the Fisherwoman to accept love as something real.
Fantasy opens the door. Intimacy walks through it.
His Body Makes Desire Look Handmade
The practical Wētā Workshop suit gives the character a physical specificity that polished digital effects could have softened.
His body contains visible labour. Strands cross around the torso. Patterns tighten across his face. The weave follows Skarsgård’s muscles while remaining rough enough to suggest the Basketmaker’s hands.
That construction turns male beauty into craft.
Cinema often presents the ideal man as though he emerged naturally with a perfect jaw and an excellent investment portfolio. Wicker displays the work. This body has been measured, shaped and woven to satisfy a particular woman.
The design also lets Colman interact with a real surface. She can touch the lattice and look through its gaps. Their closeness has friction, pressure and the faint threat of a splinter in an unforgivable location.
A dream becomes more convincing when it occupies the same room.
The Village Reveals Why He Feels Perfect
The Wicker Husband gains much of his appeal from the men around him. Their marriages rely on tradition, entitlement and women accepting disappointment as maturity.
He appears revolutionary by offering respect.
This says less about impossible standards than it does about standards kept deliberately low. The villagers could listen to their wives. They could value their work and care about their pleasure. No enchanted basketry prevents them.
They simply prefer the arrangement they inherited.
The woven man therefore becomes an accusation. Every generous act reveals something the human husbands have withheld. He has been alive for a remarkably short time and already understands partnership better than a village full of experienced married men.
No wonder everyone panics.
Dream Men Should Leave Room for Real Women
The Fisherwoman’s fantasy never requires her to become younger, quieter or more agreeable. That separates the Wicker Husband from many cinematic dream men.
He represents a desire for recognition rather than rescue.
She already has work, skill and a home. Her husband adds companionship to a life that existed before him. His devotion confirms her worth without creating it.
That is the sweet spot in Wicker. The film indulges the pleasure of a partner made to order while allowing the Fisherwoman to remain gloriously herself. Colman brings every rough edge into the romance and Skarsgård treats those edges as part of the attraction.
The Wicker Husband is tall, handsome and apparently magnificent in bed. Fine. Those details certainly help.
His true perfection lies in something less supernatural. He pays attention to the woman in front of him and loves the life she already has.
The village calls him unnatural.
The village should take notes.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves – all for God’s glory. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.