MOVIES: Wicker (2026, Alex Huston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson) 

The opening title card tells us what to expect with a declaration that this movie is "based on a fable" by Ursula Wills. And indeed, we are plopped down into a medieval village where the characters have no names; they are simply identified by their job, or since this is a patriarchy, their connection to a man's job: the Butcher, the Baker's Wife, the Tailor's Wife's Sister, and so on.

Our central character is the only woman in the movie with a job of her own. The Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) is unmarried. Combine that with the fact that she usually smells strongly of fish, and it's easy to see why she's the village outcast.

Tired of both the jokes and the solitude, the Fisherwoman goes to the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) and asks him to make her a husband. "Be at the chapel in a month," he tells her. When she arrives a month later, she finds that the Weaver has made a husband (Alexander Skarsgard) for her, woven from wicker.

The filmmakers have done a marvelous job in creating the Wicker Husband, using a combination of costume, CGI, and spectacular sound design. We can see the light coming through gaps in the weaving; we hear every creak of the wicker whenever he moves; and through all the trickery, we can still see Skarsgard's expressive face.

The Fisherwoman and the Wicker Husband have so happy a relationship that even they seem surprised by it, and when that sort of happiness arrives in a village where no one else seems to know what happiness is, much less have any of it, problems are inevitable. The biggest driver of the conflict is the Tailor's Wife, a fairy tale Mean Girl played with precisely detailed bitchiness by Elizabeth Debicki.

This is a delightful movie, funny and raunchy without losing the ability to go dark when the story requires. Colman, Skarsgard, and Debicki are terrific, and Dinklage does a fine job with the pseudo-Shakespearean monologues that mark the Weaver as an outsider in his own right.

The supporting characters are admittedly on the thin side, and the plot somewhat quickly sketched out, but such is the nature of fables; Richard E. Grant makes the strongest impression in his brief appearance as the Doctor.