Alexander Skarsgård has been asked in interviews what drew him to this particular role. “Most male actors dream of playing Hamlet at some point in their career,” he told Entertainment Weekly this week. The trailer’s bizarre line about “wicker nipples” serves as an early indication of the film’s offbeat, anything-goes comedic approach.
Black Bear dropped the first official trailer for the film Wednesday, and it’s as strange and funny as the premise deserves. Olivia Colman plays a fisherwoman living in a medieval-ish village who has grown tired of being mocked for her unmarried status — and her reportedly persistent smell of fish. Her solution is to visit the local basketmaker, played by Peter Dinklage, and commission him to build her a husband. He delivers. Skarsgård’s wicker creation walks, talks, radiates soulful charm, and, as one villager puts it in the trailer, is “strong as a tree and just as hard.” The village, predictably, loses its mind.
The film opens in select theaters October 23 before going wide October 30, Black Bear confirmed.
“Wicker” premiered at Sundance in January and walked out with a standing ovation — two of them, by some accounts. It currently sits at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, per Collider, which also noted the film earned enthusiastic reviews from critics at the festival. The Film Stage described it as built on a fun-house mirror version of reality — heightened and absurdist but surprisingly believable — with its world designed so that characters have no proper names, only roles: men referred to by their occupation, women by their relationship to those men. It’s a pointed structural choice, and the film apparently earns it, per The Film Stage.
Directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer — the pair behind the 2020 sci-fi comedy “Save Yourselves!” — the screenplay is adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones’s acclaimed short story “The Wicker Husband.” The Wicker Husband himself was built practically, not digitally: the costume came out of Weta Workshop, the same shop responsible for the creatures of “Lord of the Rings,” per The Playlist. Lol Crawley, who shot “The Brutalist,” served as cinematographer, giving the fantasy setting a visual credibility that grounds the more absurdist elements. The ensemble beyond the three leads includes Elizabeth Debicki, Richard E. Grant, Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, Ella Bruccoleri, and Kiell Smith-Bynoe, per FirstShowing.
That casting — an Oscar winner, a Golden Globe winner, two Emmy winners — is part of what made the Sundance acquisition such a fought-over deal. Deadline noted the film is “rather randy,” which tracks for a fable that the studio’s own logline describes as being about “sex, marriage, and the absurdities of social convention.” The trailer doesn’t oversell any of it. It lets the strangeness breathe — and trusts that Colman, Skarsgård, and Dinklage are funny enough to sell the rest, per AV Club.
HeyUGuys called it an “audacious comedic fable” and World of Reel simply called the trailer “unusual” — which, given the subject matter, might be the most accurate description of all.
