A woman orders a husband from a basketmaker and somehow the neighbours manage to become the embarrassing part of the story.

That is the delicious social sting of Wicker. Olivia Colman’s Fisherwoman lives on the edge of a seaside village where her smell and unmarried status provide other people with an inexhaustible supply of jokes. Then she commissions a companion made from wicker. Her romance promptly unleashes jealousy and outrage across the community. Apparently, everyone had preferred her company when they could pity her.

There is something painfully familiar inside that ridiculous premise. Some people grow very attached to your unhappiness. They learn where it places you in relation to them. They get comfortable there.

Give the village a lonely woman and it knows exactly what to do with her. Give that woman a satisfying private life and suddenly everybody has concerns.

The Village Has Already Assigned Her a Place

The Fisherwoman’s isolation gives the community a convenient point of agreement. Whatever disappointments exist behind their own doors, the villagers can look at her and feel reassured about their choices.

At least they have a spouse. At least they belong.

That little consolation has teeth. Once someone becomes the person everybody mocks, their circumstances start to feel like public property. Other people claim the right to explain their loneliness. Every difference becomes evidence that the verdict was fair.

The Fisherwoman smells because she works with fish. Within the village’s social imagination, even the practical facts of her livelihood can be turned into reasons to dismiss her. The judgement arrives first. The explanation follows.

I find that more interesting than a simple tale about people fearing an unusual newcomer. The village already has a relationship with her before the Wicker Husband arrives. It is an ugly relationship, but a useful one for those enjoying the better end of it.

Her happiness threatens to terminate the arrangement.

A Good Husband Creates Awkward Comparisons

Alexander Skarsgård’s Wicker Husband brings tenderness into a community whose domestic arrangements suddenly face uncomfortable scrutiny. His devotion attracts the women’s interest and leaves the men anxious about their own shortcomings. An apparently absurd creation becomes a rather inconvenient standard.

The comic possibilities practically write themselves. Imagine enjoying all the authority of being a husband and then having a basket turn up with better relationship skills.

Beneath the joke sits a sharper grievance. His existence makes contentment visible. People can compare the Fisherwoman’s experience with the compromises they have accepted at home.

A neighbour’s affectionate marriage can be surprisingly difficult to witness when your own relationship runs on habit and swallowed irritation. You notice the small things. The attention someone receives. The ease with which they ask for something. The expectation that their pleasure matters.

For the village, those comparisons come with an extra humiliation. The woman they have treated as undesirable has acquired the relationship worth envying.

The Tailor’s Wife Has a Position to Protect

Elizabeth Debicki’s Tailor’s Wife gives that resentment a particularly pointed focus. Her standing among the villagers is bound up with the same social order that keeps the Fisherwoman beneath her. Another woman’s freedom therefore becomes a threat to something she has learned to value.

Her character invites an uncomfortable reading of respectability. Obeying a restrictive set of rules can become easier when obedience buys you someone to look down on.

Perhaps your choices have been narrow. Perhaps marriage has demanded more accommodation than you expected. Still, you can claim the dignity of having done things properly. You have a recognised place.

Then the Fisherwoman makes an outrageous arrangement of her own and finds pleasure in it.

Where does that leave the person who has spent years treating conformity as an achievement?

This is where the village’s hostility acquires its bitterness. The Fisherwoman’s happiness raises questions about the price other women have paid for approval. Someone who resents that price may still fiercely defend it. Watching another person avoid the same bargain can feel unbearable.

The Tailor’s Wife gives the story room to explore that contradiction without making her cruelty excusable. Hurt can explain the urge to hurt somebody else. The damage still belongs to the person who chooses to inflict it.

Happiness Becomes a Breach of Etiquette

There is a possessiveness in the village’s response that makes the fairy tale feel distinctly modern. The Fisherwoman has changed something about her life without waiting for a favourable assessment from the people around her.

They seem to experience this as an offence against the group.

It is easy to imagine the respectable language available to such resentment. Concern about the marriage. Questions about the husband. Worries about what the whole thing might encourage. Envy becomes much more presentable once it has borrowed a moral vocabulary.

The underlying demand remains childish. Return to the position where we understood you.

That is the interpretation of Wicker that bites hardest for me. The villagers have treated her exclusion as a natural consequence of who she is. Her pleasure exposes how much effort they have invested in keeping that exclusion meaningful.

She can live outside their approval and still have something worth wanting. Their opinions suddenly look smaller.

She Has Better Things to Do Than Remain Their Cautionary Tale

The Fisherwoman’s romance also gives the village an opportunity. Her neighbours could become curious about a life they have dismissed. They could reconsider what makes a marriage desirable. Some might even take their dissatisfaction home and discuss it with the appropriate person.

Of course, that would involve work.

Policing the Fisherwoman is easier. Her unusual husband gives everyone a spectacular distraction from the ordinary failures they would rather avoid examining.

The pleasure of this angle is how little the fantasy needs translating. Most of us have encountered someone whose encouragement lasts only as long as we remain safely behind them. A success changes the temperature. An unexpectedly good relationship produces a strangely sour response.

Wicker makes that small social ugliness large enough to fill a village.

The Fisherwoman has spent enough of her life supplying other people with a reassuring example of how things could be worse. Now she has someone waiting for her at home. The neighbours will have to find another way to feel better about themselves.