Let’s take a moment to appreciate how wonderfully bizarre it is that Yorgos Lanthimos is now an award-winning, crowd-pleasing auteur célèbre, when just a few years ago he was considered one of cinema’s cruelest basement-dwelling freaks. No one was watching Lanthimos’s sociopathic incest thriller Dogtooth and thinking, yes, this man will soon be nominated for major-category Oscars on an annual basis. Recent titles like The Favourite, Poor Things, and Bugonia have earned the Greek filmmaker enough of a cultural foothold that his influence is starting to show in other directors’ work, though, whereas earlier efforts like Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer were so singular in their distanced, self-delighted cruelty that they were peerless to the point of feeling otherworldly. Signaling this new paradigm, the fairy-tale romcom Wicker is loudly & proudly Lanthimosian in its tone: playing flat, affectless human cruelty for farcical humor in a way that’s unmistakably indebted to the director’s signature style. It’s also a much cozier, gentler picture than anything Lanthimos has ever directed himself, repurposing his alien viewpoint on everyday social rituals for something that can be sincerely, sweetly romantic.
In genre terms, Wicker is a monsterfucker romcom. Olivia Colman stars as a medieval fisherwoman who’s shunned from everyday social rituals by the younger, prettier women in her village who don’t reek of fish. Annoyed by her designated role as the town spinster & punchline, she commissions a magically gifted basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to weave her a husband of her own whom she can parade about town to spite her many nemeses. The basket salesman over-delivers on the deal, crafting her the most handsome, devoted, virile husband the village has ever seen, as voiced & embodied by Alexander Skarsgård under a layer of interwoven prosthetics. The unlikely interspecies newlyweds canoodle, fuck, and promenade in such a cartoonishly loving fashion that it drives their fellow villagers mad with jealousy, none more so than the queen-bitch tailor’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki). The ads for Wicker sell it as a ribald sex comedy, but it’s ultimately much sweeter and more restrained than all that, functioning more as a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale than as sincere erotica. Plenty of fan fiction is already being written on the subject, though, I’m sure, as Skarsgård’s basket man makes for the perfect himbo arm candy no matter what material he’s made of.
To Wicker‘s credit, it doesn’t borrow Lanthimos’s dry humor just for the sake of it; it serves a clear thematic purpose. Lanthimos’s movies always have a way of examining everyday social rituals from a distanced perspective that makes them look absurdly arbitrary, whether they be the rituals of familial life in Dogtooth or the rituals of romantic courtship in The Lobster or the rituals of office-work hierarchy in Kinds of Kindness or so on. For its part, Wicker takes a distanced, outsider look at the rituals of a traditional marriage and finds them as inhumanly arbitrary & absurd as any uncanny behavior in a proper Lanthimos film. It portrays marriage as a never-ending series of self-imposed social rituals, with the small European village where it’s set having developed its own variations on marital traditions that stray only a few steps away from the ongoing absurdity of modern social behavior. Instead of a bride being marked as her husband’s property with a shiny wedding ring, she is ceremonially collared with a giant ornate shackle that clamps around her throat. Instead of tossing a bouquet to expectant maidens, she distributes wicker eggs that explode into puffs of colored powder, à la gender-reveal announcement parties. Instead of the husband enjoying one final night of sexual freedom before marriage at the local strip bar, he is costumed with a strap-on carrot that’s ceremonially eaten by a goat, signifying his loss of manhood. It’s all very silly, and none of it is entirely foreign to the way we actually celebrate modern weddings.
Things get a little more serious inside the wicker man & stinky fisherwoman household, where the more private, routine rituals of married life are portrayed as natural & worthwhile. Colman & Skarsgård’s physically mismatched lovers are sincerely, demonstrably affectionate towards each other, which is a difficult sentiment to come by in a proper Lanthimos film. Most of the dramatic crises that arise are a result of outsiders’ petty jealousy for their mutual affection, while everyone else’s marriages appear to be primarily practical unions in commerce & sexual reproduction. This is a town where everyone’s personhood is defined by their occupation, after all, known only by names like Fisherwoman, Butcher, Butcher’s Wife, Tailor, Tailor’s Wife, and so on. Even Skarsgård’s wicker husband is eventually known by the name Fisherfucker, since sexually pleasing his wife appears to be his most productive daily endeavor. If the movie has any recognizable value of its own outside its extension of Lanthimosian anthropology to a new social ritual, it’s all in the convincingly magical quality of that wicker Fisherfucker’s screen presence, which is just as mesmerizing to the viewer as it is to his fellow villagers. He’s an incredible creature-feature specimen, mixing practical prosthetic applications with post-production touchups that allow specks of sunlight to shine through his sexy wicker body. He is also, quite literally, perfect husband material, and the core of the movie’s heart & humor rests in the way pointless societal pressures fuck that perfect scenario up for his loving wife.
-Brandon Ledet
