Wicker is a Well-Woven Tale

Sundance Film Review: Wicker
Director: Eleanor Wilson & Alex Huston Fischer
Topic Studios
Premiere: 01.24.2026

Love, like wicker, is painstakingly crafted strand by strand, choice by choice, until something sturdy, beautiful and unique takes shape. Wicker, is an old-fashioned fairy tale about a woman who has longed for that kind of love her entire life, patiently weaving the idea of it long before she ever holds the real thing.

In a remote coastal medieval village, a lonely, hard-bitten Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman, The Favourite) lives on the margins of the community, and is particularly bullied by the  judgemental and haughty Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki, The Crown), an influential woman who sets the tone for the whole village. After years of being mocked for her independence and tired of waiting for acceptance, she commissions a local Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage, The Station Agent, Game of Thrones) to create her a husband out of wicker. Through an unexplained touch of magic, the figure comes to life, becoming a gentle, devoted Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård, The Northman), who bears an almost eerie resemblance to Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. This companion offers her the affection and stability she’s long been denied and their unconventional union unsettles the village, stirring jealousy, fear and outrage among the townspeople. As tensions rise, the relationship becomes a quiet act of rebellion, forcing the community to confront its rigid traditions, cruelty and ideas about love, belonging and conformity.

Wicker is a delightfully offbeat film, one that feels like a storybook left out in the rain — its fairy tale textures softened, warped and made stranger by time. It blends the rhythms of classic folklore with unapologetically bawdy sensibilities, pairing earthy humor and sexual candor with moments of genuine introspection and ache. At times, the film leans too hard into shock value, and not every joke lands with the same ease — some bits feel pushed when they should float. Yet even when it stumbles, Wicker remains enchanting, held together by a confidence in its own weirdness and a willingness to sit with longing, loneliness and desire rather than tidy them up. Writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson give the film a deliberate pacing that plays a bit slowly at times but effectively, nicely capturing the drudgery of the community and then hitting us with lively surprises.

The performances are a major part of Wicker’s spell. Colman is divine at the center, giving the film its aching pulse as she balances pitiable loneliness with an enviable, hard-won strength, shining brightly even in the story’s quietest moments. Skarsgård delivers some of his best work to date as the Wicker Husband, hilariously simple and stoic on the surface, yet profoundly good in a way that sneaks up on you. Debicki brings a believable, fascinating nastiness to the Tailor’s Wife, never letting the character slide into caricature, while Dinklage rounds out the main ensemble with a delicious performance full of wisdom and whimsy. Richard E. Grant (Gosford Park, Can You Ever Forgive Me?) nearly walks away with the film in a wickedly fun cameo as the eccentric and incompetent village Doctor.

In the end, Wicker lingers like the feeling of a story told at dusk — a little dirty, a little sad, and unexpectedly tender. Its rough edges and occasional missteps are part of the texture, woven into a film that’s more interested in emotional truth than polish. By blending fairy tales, raunchy comedy and quiet heartbreak, it creates something rare: a grown-up fable about longing, love and the structures we build to survive them. Like the wicker at its center, the film may bend and creak, but it holds. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.