The new film Wicker is, first and foremost, a love story. And I need to acknowledge this promptly: It is a love story about a woman who falls for a person-shaped basket. Olivia Colman’s character, who is known to the audience only as Fisherwoman, is a classic spinster. She sells her smelly haul in town, tolerates taunts from her small-minded neighbors, and then retreats to her ramshackle cottage, where she spends evenings alone by the fire. But then a local artisan fashions her a husband: a doting, affectionate man (?) whose generosity and sexual aptitude easily compensate for the fact that he is, in fact, made of natural plant fibers. (Basket guy is played by Alexander Skarsgård, not that he’s recognizable under this many prosthetics.)
As much as Wicker is a romance, though, it’s also a cautionary tale about marriage. The village in this film—which is directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, and based on a short story by Ursula Wills—is chock-full of miserable spouses. Bakerwoman and her husband aren’t having sex. Bottlewasher and his wife are, and she appears to be bored out of her mind during the act. When Tailor’s ambitious wife suggests that she might travel to set up new posts for the business, he scoffs at the notion that she’d do anything more than wear their garments around town and look pretty. Early in the movie, a young couple performs a wedding tradition: The officiant commands the man to place a heavy metal collar around his bride’s neck, a “symbol of lifelong duty.” As he struggles to clasp it, she gasps for air. The conventions of matrimony, for this community, are literally suffocating.
Wicker asks what it would take to make the institution freeing instead—or whether marriage is simply incompatible with the kind of love that is expansive rather than constraining. Fisherwoman and her husband offer one strange, touching model. Their marriage is unique, and not only because he is, once again, an actual basket. There’s also the fact that she works for pay and he doesn’t, which doesn’t go unnoticed about town. (Not much does.) Most radically, he actually respects her, and makes it known. When they marry, someone asks where the collar is, and she responds, “We won’t be needing that.”
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The presence of a loving pair in the village is totally destabilizing. The women start asking more of their husbands, who don’t appreciate the nudge. (One man grumbles about wives now seeking, for some reason, expressions of gratitude.) In a big group dance, the townspeople follow strictly choreographed steps—and they’re scandalized to see Fisherwoman and her mate creating their own moves, gazing into each other’s eyes, holding each other and swaying in the sun. Everyone seems to envy the couple their happiness and also to despise them for it. It’s as if these townspeople thought they had to live according to norms they never much liked. Now that they see that another way is possible, their own wretched and arbitrary inertia is revealed. They can’t unknow it.
If marriage is a mechanism of repression in Wicker, then love is a tool of liberation, capable of upending social order. That’s not an outrageous idea, however silly the movie is: The social scientist Alice Evans has tracked how romantic love, across history and nations, has driven gender equality. A besotted straight man is especially likely to see women as deserving of rights and dignity. But the film also warns that devotion is not enough, on its own, to resist the stultifying power of convention. When some men in a bar accuse the wicker husband of making their wives suddenly unsatisfied, he asks Baker: “Do you love your wife?” Baker responds that he does, and for a brief moment, he talks about her tenderly. Soon, though, the men go back to their griping. And eventually, even Fisherwoman starts succumbing to petty possessiveness. She gets paranoid about infidelity and treats her poor, hunky stick pile unkindly. You might go into a marriage starry-eyed, the film knows, and still grow complacent or controlling.
Wicker is, I think, a good fit for this moment of romantic ambivalence. On the one hand, a large share of singles say they want to marry someday. On the other hand, many of them don’t know how or when they’ll achieve that goal. Some are struggling to find the right partner. Others are busy applying for jobs in an unforgiving market, or saving endlessly for a house they may never be able to afford. On average, people are marrying later and less. So young adults especially are being pushed to think critically about traditional milestones, if only because they’re not hitting them.
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Fisherwoman is an eccentric middle-aged woman in a tunic smeared with seafood guts, yet she might be a relatable protagonist for plenty of Zoomers: In the beginning of the movie, she mocks marriage, but only because she feels shut out of it. She both longs for romance and fears the vulnerability it requires—perhaps a particularly resonant conundrum now, when a great chunk of Gen Z seems to fear rejection and crave security. “I had such a simple life,” Fisherwoman cries to her husband. “It was nothing special, but I knew it. Now you have my heart.”
One might worry that Wicker, with all of its rather unsubtle critiques of marriage, could further discourage romance-wary viewers. But as much as it’s skeptical of matrimony—and cynical about some of its characters—this is a film that roots for connection. It argues for fighting against the pull of culture and habit and convenience, day after day, to see your partner not as your belonging but as their own person. And it asks whether Fisherwoman can treat her husband, who looks a lot like an object, as a complex being with his own free will—not because she vowed to, but because he is improbably, amazingly, alive.