What are critics saying about 'Wicker'?

A husband... made out of wicker? That's the premise of a new fantasy rom com (yes, really).

Wicker is based on the short story "The Wicker Husband" by Ursula Wills-Jones, where ridiculed fisher woman decides to get a basket weaver to construct a wicker husband for her, resulting in jealousy, fascination and disorderly reaction among the villagers.

"On the outskirts of a village by the sea, lives a Fisherwoman; smelly, single and perpetually ridiculed. One day, fed up with her stuffy, small-minded neighbours, she commissions herself a husband to be made from wicker. In an otherwise conservative town, this unconventional romance sparks outrage, jealousy and chaos," the film's plot synopsis reads.

Black Bear Pictures

As for the cast, it's a pretty stacked line up, starring Olivia Colman as the Fisherwoman, Alexander Skarsgård as Wicker Husband, Elizabeth Debicki as the Tailor's Wife, Peter Dinklage as the Basket Weaver, Marli Siu as the Taylor's wife's sister, Nabhaan Rizwan as the Tailor, and Richard E. Grant as the Village doctor.

What are critics saying?

Black Bear Pictures

Critics have been sharing their reviews of Wicker and it has generally gone down favourably with it receiving a 94 per cent critics score on film and TV aggregate website, Rotten Tomatoes.

Elsewhere, it has an IMDb rating of 7.4 out of 10, and scored 3.7 out of 5 on film review platform Letterboxd.

The Independent's Clarisse Loughrey said in her four-star review, "It’s a strange and amusing world conjured by Tóth András Dániel and Godena-Juhász Attila’s costumes and Renátó Cseh’s sets, then given a touch of the Yorgos Lanthimos thanks to cinematographer Lol Crowley’s cold but beautiful images."

"Bouncing all the way to a truly perfect ending, “Wicker” is funny and freaky and sweetly romantic. It is also relentless in its conviction that the most destabilizing force in a society is a woman who dares to ask for what she wants," said New York Times's Jeannette Catsoulis.

The Hollywood Reporter's Richard Lawson wrote, "A warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect."

"Ultimately, there’s too much here that doesn’t gel, a tonally uneven mix of mostly unfunny bawdy humour, dark fantasy and unlikely romance, too much wood but not enough fire," said The Guardian's Benjamin Lee in his two-star review.

Variety's Peter Dubruge noted, "One could say the filmmakers have been strategically reverent toward the source material, but slyly disrespectful in all other respects," and praised the directors for putting "an irreverent spin on a suddenly relevant supernatural allegory about the perks and perils of falling in love with a nonhuman partner."

"Colman performance as The Fisherwoman is crucial to the film’s success. She’s smart enough to stand up for herself against the pettiness of the villagers but also with a flickering insecurity that means she can’t quite believe her good luck," commented Screen Daily's Amber Wilkinson.

IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio gave the film a B grade and wrote, "Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be."

When is the release date?

Black Bear UK

Wicker came out in US cinemas on October 23, while in the UK and Ireland it was released October 30.

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