Wicker(2026)

This review may contain spoilers.

Quirky, whimsical, if a bit overtly cynical, Wicker is an entertaining adventure full of quippy one-liners, though I’m not sure how I feel about what it appears to say about love. 

Wicker man’s says he fixed the roof to make the fisherwoman happy. He loves her, so he’s happy when she’s happy (then they have to fix the bed again.) I wonder if this is to remind us that love is simple. But it isn’t simple. For the fisherwoman from the very beginning, it wasn’t enough that the wicker man loved her, she also needed him to fix her roof and straighten her door. He did so much in addition to loving her that it made her the envy of the whole village, and even that wasn’t enough. All this makes the claim that wicker man learned love from the fisherwoman a bit of a hard sell for me. 

After a bit of reflection, the truest love I see in the story is actually bottle washer who attempts to improve his roof to impress his wife. Yeah, he was insecure, but who wouldn’t be intimidated by an Alexander Skasgard shaped tall wicker man with undying devotion to his wife, unlimited home improvement skills, and unending erections? Instead of lashing out, he works through his insecurity and attempts to mend their marriage. It ends in tragedy, quite ingloriously so and much less romantic than the main couple’s story, but it felt more real to me. 

This is a tangent but after watching Wicked I did pose the question “would you still let jonathan bailey hit if his dick was burlap?” Given this movie’s entire premise was basically that, and the similar name, I was wondering if there was a connection, but no, evidently it was based on a book.