Dating is hard in the modern age, so much so that people are turning away from flesh-and-blood humans and toward digital partners. Wicker, a new movie starring Aleksander Skarsgård, Olivia Colman, Elizabeth Debicki, and Peter Dinklage, takes a medieval approach to that phenomenon. In the movie, a fisherwoman (Colman) who has been unlucky in love turns to the village basketmaker (Dinklage) and asks him to make a husband for her. He does—without even flinching at the request, which tells me this movie is gonna be fun. He builds her a whole-ass man out of wicker (Skarsgård), and with her new wicker man, Colman turns life in her village upside down.
Much ado has been made about the male loneliness epidemic. Men’s inability to find partners gets concerned write-ups in the papers of record that often ignore factors like the reality that many men are steeped in online algorithms designed to fry their brains into misogynistic crisps, or that some have been so stunted in their evolutions as human beings that they’ve developed no life skills (or choose not to use them equitably), expecting their partners to become a second mom who they occasionally get to fuck. The reason why romantasy books and games like Love and Deepspace are so wildly popular is that they provide what often feels like a fantasy—a competent, emotionally intelligent dude (who is very hot).
Wicker looks to be finely tuned to take advantage of this new market of competency porn that doesn’t shy away from the whole porn part of it. Colman and her wicker husband are having hot basket sex right in the trailer. She unflinchingly discusses her sex life with the other villagers which, even in a society that’s slowly recognizing that women don’t disappear or lose their desire after 40, still feels revolutionary, especially for a period piece. And though Skarsgård (who seems to be in his awkward n’ sexy era thanks to Pillion and Murderbot) is indeed made out of wicker, Colman doesn’t attempt to hide him. They’re out in the open, freak flag (and other things) at full mast.
With so many monstrous monsterfucker movies out there (looking at you Nosferatu and Frankenstein), I appreciate that Wicker seems to take a sweeter approach. I hope the movie continues to play it like a straight-up rom-com with no sudden dark twists, and I also hope the movie answers the one burning question the trailer left me with: “Y’all are using lube, right?”