REVIEW: Wicker - meandering fable offers pleasures enough

You could search all day for the moral and all the various meanings behind Wicker, but maybe it’s best just to enjoy it for all its weird and wonderful bonkersness.

Writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson offer the fable – set in some vaguely middle-age village – of the smelly lonely fisherwoman who endures the scorn of the locals until the day she commissions for herself a wicker husband, beautifully and most effectively created by the local basket-weaver, a stodgy, starchy Peter Dinklage – a creation impressively effective in its every last detail.

It’s a commission that throws the cat among the pigeons for everyone all around.

We are talking about a ghastly patriarchal society where the women are literally yoked as part of the wedding ceremony, a village where all the men are called after the jobs they perform and the women after the husbands they are shackled to.

And that’s the unpleasant set-up that’s rocked when Olivia Colman as the sad and lonely fisherwoman is suddenly sad and lonely no more. Her shrieks of delight as her passionate wicker man does his nightly business can be heard all around. The village husbands feel threatened; the wives sense that there might just be more to life.

Resentments and jealousies proliferate, and sadly the fisherwoman isn’t immune when the village’s bitchy queen bee pours spite in her ear. Meanwhile, the wicker man (voiced by Alexander Skarsgård) remains sweet, kind, gentle and oddly a bit of a philosopher.

There are plenty of laugh-out loud moments and some brilliant lines, maybe the best coming from the basket-weaver himself, a line largely unrepeatable here when he protests that he hasn’t just made the fisherwoman a piece of (ahem!) furniture.

But there’s a slight feeling that the whole thing meanders just a little after the sprightliest of starts. Even wicker man’s passion goes off the boil as the film starts to wander.

But it rallies again towards the end, and the more you think about it, the more poignant it becomes – the tale of a nasty little village which is challenged and found decidedly wanting. It will leave you with a smile.