Wicker Review – Olivia Colman is a smelly fisherman who falls in love with a wicker man in an uneven tale | Sundance 2026

IIn terms of plotlines that demand attention, this year’s Sundance has a few. There’s the body horror film Saccharine, about a diet craze that involves eating human ashes, and the midnight movie Buddy, about a Barney-style children’s TV star who starts killing kids, and then there’s Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, which you can probably imagine.

But “wait what?” Annual. The award easily goes to the offbeat tale The Wicker, the story of a foul-smelling spinster fisherman who assigns herself a pair made of bamboo. Although the film has the expected amount of audience-exciting moments – bringing most of the hype on and off screen – there is an attempt to give us more than just easy shock value, something that can’t always be said about films in this often boring category. Writers and directors Alex Huston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson, who previously directed the beloved alien invasion comedy Save Yourselves! For the festival, they used their far-flung premise to touch on more relevant issues of our world such as the patriarchal cruelty of marriage and the private wrath reserved for those who dare to live outside the accepted rules. They succeed in brief flashes but ultimately, there’s a lot here that doesn’t hold together, an uneven mix of mostly unfunny bawdy humour, dark fantasy and unlikely romance, and too much wood but not enough fire.

Olivia Colman, who received mixed scores at Sundance ranging from “Daddy” to “Gemba,” is the fisherwoman, whose scent is as noted as her vocabulary. She is largely immune to insults, happily removed from the archaic gender roles that curse the local village. But after she comically mocks another terrible wedding, the punches start to have an effect, and instead of laughing away, she asks the local basket maker (Peter Dinklage, who always looks like he’s about to break into song) to make her a husband. A month later it arrives.

There’s an impressive ambition to the filmmaking, an intricately constructed world that often mixes the old with bits of the new. Like many fairy tales, it is a society built on the importance of men and the respect of women. Men are defined by their profession and women by their relationship with their husband. In the wedding ritual, the man does not present a ring to his wife, but rather insists on putting a band on her. The Huntress’s blatant refusal to abide by the rules, and take charge of her life as the breadwinner, throws society into disarray. The women, led by a surging queen bee played by Elizabeth Debicki, are terrified and perhaps a little jealous, perhaps aroused by her new husband, played by Alexander Skarsgård in impressively handsome wicker clothing (the effects here are top-notch). Men worry about what their sexual and domestic perfection means to them and how their wives view them. Can anyone be happy anymore?

The central relationship is taken seriously enough for us to want more than we are ultimately given. His arrival raises a lot of questions—what does he know, what does he want, what does she need, what was she missing—and yet their early scenes rely mostly on comedic strong sex (the questions about the splinters are never answered) rather than any real development. He is designed to love her but there is no exploration of what this means for their relationship and any agency he might want or need. These may seem like silly ideas while watching a movie like this, but we’re meant to be emotionally invested in what’s happening. When the conflict comes, it’s often both simple and complicated – has he fucked anyone else in town – and although there’s a poignant scene of Coleman breaking down while explaining the difficulties of sharing the life she previously lived alone (and she’s still one of our greatest criers) it’s too late. We know nothing about his reaction to the world or who he really is, only his blind devotion to her and when tragedy inevitably strikes, there is no real connection to any of it. I was thinking about how interested I was in the more dramatic but less verbal relationship between Sally Hawkins and the fish man in The Shape of Water. There are ways to make us care about fantasy romances like this that I don’t think Fisher and Wilson were able to find.

It’s hard to imagine many other working actors playing the Fisherman, and Colman often seems like the rare actor whose career allows certain films to exist. I haven’t liked her choices lately (The Roses, Jimpa, Wicked Little Letters) but she’s never been less devoted to the often out-of-touch parts and she gives them all of it even though I wish the script had given her more depth. It knows how to oscillate between broad comedy and wrenching drama but the film revolving around it isn’t quite as skillful. Like the dream pair at its centre, Wicker looks the part but there’s nothing underneath.