Peter Dinklage making Olivia Colman a husband out of wicker is a premise with its own built-in sales pitch. Then you add Alexander Skarsgård as the finished product and practically hear the internet warming up. A very tall basket with cheekbones. Fair enough. I would click too.

The exciting part comes after that first laugh. Wicker gives its handmade husband a place inside an actual romance, with tenderness and sexual desire attached. The woman who commissions him has to live with the consequences of wanting someone. The joke acquires a household.

That commitment is the reason this peculiar film has my attention. Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer have taken an idea that could comfortably fill a comedy sketch and asked it to carry emotional weight. A wicker man becomes much more interesting once somebody can hurt his feelings.

A Fairy Tale Needs People Who Believe They Live There

Adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story The Wicker Husband, the film follows Colman’s Fisherwoman as she commissions a spouse from Dinklage’s Basket Weaver. Skarsgård plays the result. Around them sits a medieval village whose inhabitants have plenty of opinions about how other people should live.

There is something pleasingly practical about the transaction. The Fisherwoman wants companionship. A craftsman has a useful skill. She places an order. Magic enters through the same door as any other piece of village business.

That matter-of-fact quality gives the absurdity room to grow. Once the husband exists, the story can concern itself with what his presence does to a marriage and a community. Explaining every enchanted twig would be a dreadful use of everyone’s afternoon.

Fairy tales have always understood this. A person can be made from an unlikely material and still suffer terribly. The audience accepts the impossible event because the feelings around it follow a recognisable logic.

Wicker has an especially good starting point for that bargain. Wanting somebody who treats you well is easy to understand. Resorting to a basketmaker adds a certain desperation, admittedly, but the emotional request remains modest.

Let the Wicker Husband Be Attractive

Skarsgård’s casting carries an obvious visual joke. His height and romantic leading-man presence survive a transformation into something you might otherwise associate with a conservatory. The film has chosen an actor audiences already know how to desire, then given that desire an unfamiliar surface.

The woven texture matters. So do the creaks and the cumbersome physicality described in the film’s festival introduction. This husband has a body with peculiar limitations, which gives the fantasy something solid to work with. He occupies space beside Colman. He has to move through the world.

I like the nerve of allowing that body to be both funny and appealing. Films can become terribly anxious around an unusual romantic pairing. A quick gag provides an escape whenever affection threatens to become too exposed.

Here, the central proposition asks for a little more nerve from the audience. Stay with the attraction. Let the Fisherwoman want him. Consider the possibility that a man made from wicker might have something going for him beyond his novelty value.

Skarsgård is particularly useful for that invitation because his screen presence already contains a strange mixture of elegance and awkward scale. Put him inside this design and the physical incongruity becomes part of the appeal.

Colman Gives the Wish Somewhere to Land

The Fisherwoman’s loneliness gives the premise its pressure. She lives under the scrutiny of people who have made her an object of ridicule. Ordering a husband becomes an act with real personal exposure. She has admitted that she wants something, and everyone gets to watch what happens next.

Colman makes sense at the centre of that situation. Her great gift as an actor is the feeling that a character has a private emotional life continuing beneath whatever conversation happens to be underway. A joke can sit very close to a bruise.

The Fisherwoman needs enough force to make such an outrageous request seem like a decision she would actually take. She also needs a vulnerability that makes the answer matter.

The premise gives Colman room for both. A woman can be blunt and still long for affection. She can cope with being mocked while carrying every insult home. Those tensions are rich enough to sustain attention after the surprise of the wicker husband has worn off.

For me, the most promising element is the dignity granted to her wanting. An older woman’s appetite for love and sex gets to drive a fantastical story this elaborate. Someone has built an entire impossible man around taking her desire seriously.

The Neighbours Have to Live With the Joke

The husband’s arrival stirs jealousy because the Fisherwoman’s private solution becomes a public comparison. Suddenly everyone has something to look at.

That is where the premise starts producing its own dramatic machinery. A happy couple can be an irritating sight when you have invested years in accepting less. Give that couple a visibly impossible husband and the irritation becomes almost deliciously unfair.

The villagers have to account for him. His existence challenges their assumptions about who deserves affection and what a respectable marriage should look like. They can stare at his woven body for as long as they like. Eventually their attention reveals something about their own lives.

This is also why emotional sincerity helps the comedy. The neighbours need to feel threatened by something valuable. If the romance has warmth, their resentment becomes petty in a specific and painful way. They are interfering with someone’s happiness.

Give the Strange Idea a Whole Film

My interest in Wicker comes from that willingness to stay with its invention. The premise invites a laugh in a sentence. Sustaining it requires the filmmakers to imagine an actual relationship between a woman and her manufactured spouse.

That takes a particular kind of confidence. You have to let an audience find the image silly while asking them to care about the people inside it. You have to risk a tender moment landing awkwardly. The wicker remains visible throughout.

I find that risk enormously enticing. An elaborate fantasy romance needs the freedom to look a little foolish. Desire already makes people foolish, often with considerably less attractive results than Alexander Skarsgård.

There is pleasure in watching a strange idea receive the full resources of a romance. The costumes and performances become part of an invitation to believe that something this unlikely could matter to someone this much.

By all means, laugh at the exceptionally handsome basket. Then let him be somebody’s husband.