Wicker review

I saw Wicker with friends, a group of mostly women, and enjoyed the experience more than I expected. Olivia Colman plays an unmarried fisherwoman in an old-fashioned village where everybody apparently has something to say about her lack of a husband. Eventually, she gets tired of it and asks the local basket maker, played by Peter Dinklage, to make her one. He agrees, and Alexander Skarsgård turns up as her furniture husband, ready to get married and get to work. Much of that work involves fixing her house, doing chores and providing loud, fulfilling, uproarious sex that wakes the neighbors and repeatedly destroys their bed. The other men in the village become jealous because they’re consistently being shown up by this magical automaton, and their wives are becoming envious. The men can’t live up to the example he’s setting, and they don’t handle that particularly well. There’s plenty of comedy in this, and that dynamic drives much of the humor here.

My only issue with any of this is that I couldn’t help thinking that if the genders were reversed, women would be very upset with this film. If a man brought an artificial woman home who handled all the domestic duties, provided the best sex of his life, on demand, and otherwise meekly did whatever he wanted, we would be talking about her autonomy and about a man creating a woman specifically to satisfy him. I don’t understand why those questions should be any different here.

The premise here brought Companion and Obsession to mind. Those films explore what it means for someone’s love to be manufactured or controlled, including what that means for the person being controlled. In Wicker, we largely pass over that. He’s brought into existence to love this woman, and he does, and we’re supposed to take that for what it is. The film portrays his feelings as genuine, but that doesn’t answer the question of agency. That's not enough to prevent me from enjoying this, I just feel like it just sort of sits there, unaddressed.

Separately, on the acting, I wish Alexander Skarsgård would get himself into more roles that allow him to express a wider range of emotions. He’s a talented actor, but between Murderbot, Wicker and Pillion, I feel like he keeps playing versions of the same guy. In Murderbot, he’s a stoic robot gradually developing feelings for his humans. Here, he’s a stoic artificial husband with quiet feelings for the woman who had him made. In Pillion, he’s the quiet, emotionally stunted dominant partner in a sexual relationship. He keeps being asked to be physically imposing and reveal very little of himself.

Now I know that will upset some Pillion fans, but I just don’t think he’s being given enough to do. He's basically been stuck playing Tarzan since Tarzan.

I’d like to see him spend more time with dialogue and play somebody who gets to express himself openly. I feel like he’s doing himself a disservice by continuing to take these roles. There’s more there, and I want to see it.

I enjoyed Wicker and I had a good evening at the movies with friends. Regardless at the end I kept coming back to the premise and how differently we would respond to the same arrangement if a man were getting everything he wanted from a woman he’d had made for himself. See it, but think about it.