Due to having signed up for an Odeon Limitless Scheme which means I can see as many films as I want and having a bit of free time on a Saturday afternoon, I decided to give Wicker a try. From the trailer it looked like a quirky comedy starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård and a Wicker Man (they deserve credit for not using the term Wicker Man during the film!).
The plot sees The Fisherwoman (Colman) who lives in a village and is ridiculed for being single and smelly so in an attempt to put an end to this, she asks The Basketmaster (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband and one month later he does in the form The Wicker Husband (Skarsgård). The rest of the film follows the reaction from the villagers.
Colman plays the role of The Fisherwoman really well but you know that you are going to get a great performance from Colman. The thing that Colman manages to achieve is she makes you feel sympathetic to what is happening to her. In the hands of someone else, there is a very real possibility that the character would come across as irritating or dull but not with Colman in the role. Skarsgård does a great job of playing a role that is rather restricted. The Wicker Husband can't really show emotion or anything like that yet Skarsgård manages to make the character seem likeable. It's always good to see Peter Dinklage in films and whilst his role is smaller than Colman's or Skarsgård, its still a good from from Dinklage. After he delivers the husband to The Fisherwoman, he disappears for close to an hour before being asked to create a wicker baby. Elizabeth Debicki is the closest that the film gets to a villain as someone who seemingly likes to be divisive and not the nicest to people around her especially The Fisherwoman.
As this is a British film the rest of the cast are well known to British audiences. They are all really good and there isn't a performance that lets the side down. Richard E Grant comes in for his cameo role which was probably filmed in an afternoon as the dad of The Tailor's Wife. He was great and giving his usual Richard E Grant type performance but he was in it for about five minutes and it would have been nice to have more from him.
Speaking of the Wicker baby, this was the moment where it felt like it was turning into a horror film cause that baby looked horrific. It reminded me of a 1987 Doctor Who story called Delta and the Bannermen where the baby looked very similar to the Wicker baby (but green). The reason for the wicker baby being created are perfectly reasonable as its done with the hope of making a situation better.
There are things which probably don't matter in the grand scheme of things but there were questions not asked such as how long can wicker people live for? and also can the wicker baby grow or is it destined to stay that small? They aren't really relevant to the plot but they were questions that popped into my head whilst I was watching this.
Whilst I liked this film, I didn't love it. I thought that the tone of the film was strange with the humour working but it didn't go too over the top or too serious and as a result it didn't work for me in the way that it might work for others. I did like the performances and the setting was really well used and the plot is good but in the end the humour let it down slightly. This is definitely one of the stranger films on the year.
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