Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s Wicker is easily one of the most delightfully audacious films of the year. After all, who doesn’t want to watch Olivia Colman have her world rocked by a surprisingly sexy and sensual human basket?
CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD
Yet, for all its eccentric charms, the ending of Wicker wilts. The finale fails not because of plot holes or confused themes, but because the filmmakers lose their nerve, refusing to follow through on the darker impulses they so brilliantly set up.
The film thrives on high-concept absurdity and Manichaean storytelling: after the Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård) and the Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) marry, the local villagers grow increasingly envious of their unconventional marital bliss. Driven by malice, the Tailor’s Wife (a wonderfully sinister Elizabeth Debicki) orchestrates a cruel deception, tricking the Fisherwoman into believing her woven spouse has been unfaithful and fathered a wicker baby. Devastated and manipulated, the Fisherwoman sets her husband ablaze. It is a decidedly nasty and dark pivot for a film that had previously left us to giggle at the horridness and stupidity of its small-town villains.
The resolution, however, safely lands the tragedy. The Wicker Husband survives, the tables are turned on the townsfolk through a deception of his own, and the central couple quietly ride off into the sunset. Thematically, this makes sense: the villagers are undone by the very greed and deceit they weaponised. But thematic coherence and dramatic satisfaction are two very different things. The absence of a proper reckoning for those responsible, and the relative ease with which the central couple escape, leave the conclusion feeling strangely weightless.
Much of the film’s third-act tension rests squarely on Debicki. Armed with a wonderfully posh Yorkshire accent, her escalating malice suggests Wicker is about to mutate into a genuinely disturbing folk-horror nightmare. The late-stage revelation that she was responsible for a young boy’s death elevates her from a petty, jealous gossip into an outright monster. It is a chilling promise of a vicious final reckoning. Yet, once her wickedness is exposed, the film simply shrugs and moves on, leaving her punishment to little more than a look of disgust from her husband. It feels like a massive pulling of punches, wasting the immense menace Debicki brings to the screen.
Ultimately, Wicker gets caught between two competing instincts. It cannot decide whether to maintain its mischievous, tongue-in-cheek absurdity or fully plunge into the unsettling folk horror it threatens to become. Both could have worked beautifully. Instead, the film teases the audience with a glimpse of something genuinely wicked, only to retreat the moment things get interesting – and then leaves two of its three most compelling characters completely out of the finale.
If you’re going to invite us into the dark, you have to turn off the lights; otherwise, leave us basking in the blissful, whimsical absurdity that made the film so enjoyable in the first place.
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