Name: Wicker
Genre: Romance, Fantasy, Comedy
Released: 2026-01-24T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 105 min
Cast: Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu

Nobody in Wicker has a name. The villagers are their trades and their marriages: the Baker, the Innkeeper, the Doctor, the Tailor’s Wife. Olivia Colman plays the Fisherwoman, single, smelly by the village’s account and mocked for both. Tired of it, she goes to the local basketmaker, played by Peter Dinklage, and pays him to weave her a husband. What he delivers is Alexander Skarsgård, made of willow.

That rule about names is the premise’s engine. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who wrote and directed the film together from Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story The Wicker Husband, have built a village where every person is a function, and a function has no room for a woman who is happy outside hers. The husband is the one character literally made for a single purpose. According to reviewers who saw it at Sundance, he is also the one the village’s women start to covet.

Skarsgård cast as an object, Colman as the woman nobody wanted

The casting is the film’s argument before a word is spoken. Colman, an Oscar winner usually trusted with wit and composure, takes the part Wills-Jones’s story calls “the ugly girl”. AwardsWatch’s Karen Peterson wrote that Colman plays it through manner as much as appearance. Skarsgård, a Golden Globe winner whose recent roles, from Big Little Lies to The Northman, have mostly traded on menace, is turned into a made thing: TheWrap reported that he has been “transformed from head to toe into a wooden man.” Dinklage weaves him. Elizabeth Debicki plays the Tailor’s Wife, one of the village’s married women.

Put those four together and the joke becomes clear. The village decides who is desirable. The film hands desire to the person the village ranked last, then gives her a partner nobody else picked.

From an alien-invasion comedy to a fable at the Eccles

Fischer and Wilson arrived with Save Yourselves!, a small comedy about a couple who unplug from their phones just as aliens invade. Wicker is their second feature, and it premiered to a full house at the Eccles, the biggest theatre at Sundance, according to AwardsWatch. The jump is in scale, not subject. Both films put a couple under pressure from outside and watch what the relationship does. Here the outside is a whole social order.

Black Bear bought North American rights after the festival and also handles international sales. Topic Studios and Tango Entertainment financed the film; Votiv originated and financed development; Colman produces through South of the River Pictures alongside Ed Sinclair and Tom Carver, and David Michôd produces through Yoki. It was shot in Budapest.

Deadline describes it, from the official logline, as “a comedic fable about sex, marriage, and the absurdities of social convention.” Skarsgård told the Spanish agency EFE that the social critique drew him in: the script, he said, talked about “our society, about patriarchy, the institution of marriage and its absurd parts” in a very funny way. Colman told EFE that the film does carry feminist aspects, and that she knows the label drives some viewers off. “If they say that, then they are not the kind of people I want to see it,” she said.

Where the willow joke runs thin

Not every critic bought the fable. TheWrap’s Chase Hutchinson called Wicker “an occasionally charming cocktail of silliness and sincerity that still feels oddly watered down,” and wrote that the “sluggish and predictable story starts to run out of steam” once the first joke has been repeated. He did single out Dinklage, who “steals every scene he gets,” though he added that the film does not use him as much as one would hope.

There is also a problem the press notes do not solve. A husband built to specification is wish fulfilment by definition. Skarsgård’s defence, to EFE, is that the character “was created to marry the fisherwoman, but his feelings are real.” That is an actor’s reading, not proof. If a made man cannot refuse, the romance is a purchase, and the satire of a village that treats marriage as a transaction risks becoming one more transaction. Judging by the reviews, the film is more interested in the village’s reaction than in settling that question.

Who is in Wicker and who made it

Beyond Colman, Skarsgård, Dinklage and Debicki, the cast includes Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan as the Tailor, Richard E. Grant as the Doctor, Kiell Smith-Bynoe as the Innkeeper, Gustav Lindh, Ella Bruccoleri, Ben Ashenden and Phil Daniels. Lol Crawley shot it, Sofi Marshall edited it and Anna Meredith wrote the score. Dev Patel was originally announced opposite Colman before Skarsgård took the role.

Olivia Colman in a straw hat as the Fisherwoman in a candlelit room in Wicker (2026) — Olivia Colman as the Fisherwoman in *Wicker* (2026)

Wicker opened in US theaters on October 23 through Black Bear. The distributor had announced a limited start with a nationwide expansion on October 30, but Variety’s weekend tracking already counted 1,471 locations and projected $6 million to $8 million, against Clayface, Wildwood, Ali G: Who Iz I? and Klara and the Sun. It reaches UK and Irish cinemas on October 30, also via Black Bear, Canada through Elevation Pictures and Australia on November 5 through Roadshow. It runs 105 minutes and stands at 94 percent positive across 109 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Skarsgård is credited simply as the Wicker Husband. In a village where a name is a job, that may be the most honest line in the credits: he was made to be one thing, and the film’s whole wager is that a woman who paid for him gets to want more.