Wild wood: "Wicker"

There are, it transpires, major advantages to farming out material that would otherwise have provided the basis for a cosy Britfilm to unlikely and unusual suspects. Adapted from Ursula Wills' story The Wicker Husband by the married American indie tyros Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson (who did 2020's shuffingly reviewed comedy Save Yourselves!), the new period romance Wicker lands on the screen trailing an earthiness you suspect the clean-cut folks of Working Title would have turned their noses right up at. We're transported back to an abstraction of the Middle Ages - Peter Strickland's beloved Hungary, recast as rural Britain - where we meet Olivia Colman as a filthy-faced fisherwoman who reeks of tench and gudgeon (pointedly the least sexy of fish), pisses in a bucket, and spends her nights nodding off alone by her hovel's fireplace, thereby avoiding the metal collars with which the village's brides are symbolically fitted on their wedding day. Still, the lady has her needs. To this end, Fisherwoman (as she's known) commissions the local basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to fashion her a husband out of whatever's to hand; he comes back to her, as you'll no doubt be aware, with a wicker Alexander Skarsgård, which is to say an Alexander Skarsgård under one of those make-up jobs that leave you wondering how many hours an actor had to spend in the chair each morning. We're left in little doubt that this artisan sex doll comes with functioning genitalia, even if we're given renewed cause to worry about splinters; crucially, though, this other wicker man doesn't just break the bed (repeatedly), he's also a dab hand when it comes to repairing it, which may be the closest definition of what women (and doubtless some men) want that the mainstream cinema has arrived at all year. Behold: self-erecting IKEA furniture.

Instead of the usual literal-minded historical realism, then, we're being offered something a good deal more imaginative: a post-feminist fable that falls to Earth somewhere between lost Chaucerian text and an Angela Carter rewrite of Frankenstein. (Before the closing credits roll, we will also witness a) a wicker baby, b) a wicker woman, and c) a very angry mob.) Fischer and Huston keep destabilising this material, making this story multiple degrees stranger than even the early Internet buzz made it sound. A montage of nocturnal time passing is cut in such a sharp way as to suggest someone taking large chomps out of the moon; a wedding celebration involves both a bizarre, staccato, made-up dance and Phil Daniels being fitted with a penis-carrot that is then bitten off by a goat. Hamnet this is not. The unexpected pleasures keep coming. Going in, I had wondered whether it was the wicker man's otherness that might be the source of conflict here - but no: too familiar, too obvious. In actual fact, it's the way this sturdy non-human shows up his reedy fellow villagers - and more specifically, his fellow husbands, who've tended to treat their wives like possessions or livestock. Fischer and Huston are interested in relationships, but they go after these relationships in the most roundabout fashion, continually locating curious ways into and out of scenes: Dinklage's idiosyncratically florid narration, the actor weaving words as the Basketmaker does wicker; ominous chapter headings (seemingly lifted directly from Wills's pages); a sequence of impromptu tavern surgery where disgraced doctor Richard E. Grant appears more concerned with eating his lunch. Wicker proves at least as funny-peculiar as it is funny-haha, staffed as it is by eccentric Brits and impish imports (Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki) who similarly got the joke. Yet its handsome worldbuilding doesn't for a moment obscure the hearts and emotions in play here. A quivering Colman makes the Fisherwoman more representative than any sketch-show creation; while Skarsgard, wisely, doesn't try and play through the make-up as, for example, Tom Cruise did in the recent Digger. Instead, he just sits there, steady, constant, his baffled blue eyes seeming to ask both how he's got here and why all men can't be made this way. (I was quite pleased to hear the crunching noise the Wicker Husband makes when he moves: it's the exact sound my right shoulder makes first thing in the morning.) Like a thoughtfully designed wet room, the movie backs up its kinks with craft and an all too rare understanding of human wants and desires: it's not just an oddly enchanting adult fairytale, but one that's been built to last.

Wicker is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Boys behind bars: "Animol"

Ashley Walters has used the money and clout he gained from appearing in Netflix's Adolescence to produce and direct the kind of project he himself might have starred in some twenty-odd years ago upon leaving the So Solid Crew behind. Animol returns us to a site that has been a source of fascination for the British film and television industry since the days of Alan Clarke, when it was known as borstal; in dramatising the day-to-day workings of what is now referred to as a young offenders' institute, Walters and screenwriter Nick Love are basically updating Clarke's landmark Scum for a generation with neck tattoos, access to rec-yard drone drops and smartphones concealed about their person. (Probably best not to ask where about their person, nor how on earth they got them up there in the first place.) Tut Nyuot's Troy is that archetypal prison-movie figure, the essentially decent yet conflicted lad attempting to keep his head down and serve his time without getting into trouble. He lands an ally, a smoke partner and perhaps even something more besides in likable young Polish burglar Krystian (Vladyslav Baliuk), although we're led to question how much back-up the latter can provide, given that he spends his first days in chokey being beaten black and blue. For these two, it transpires, are merely fresh-faced pawns in a mounting turf war between the sleepy-eyed Dion (Sekou Diaby), who's asked Troy to smuggle in his phone as a means of controlling the (apparently voluminous) flow of drugs through the facility, and Troy's heavily tatted, livewire cellmate Mason (Ryan Dean), whose first act is to stage a one-man recreation of the Grange Hill credits in the refectory by kicking off over a stray breakfast sausage. We wonder (and worry) whether even Stephen Graham, strolling on in the comfiest of cardigans as the prison's emotional welfare officer Claypole, can really do much to open up a path forwards and a way out: for one thing, Graham has never seemed smaller on screen than he does here, obliged to share confined spaces with often rampaging hotheads 25 years his junior.

The backdrop would have seemed familiar even without the recent spoiler of Lionsgate's heavily marketed, more overtly commercial thriller Wasteman. But Walters and Love change up the dynamic occupying the foreground. Where Wasteman boiled down to a one-on-one cat-and-mouse game, Animol is two-versus-two, Walters seeking out young actors who, in squaring up to one another, describe subtly distinct ideas of troubled masculinity. The genre these characters are pitched into is less thriller than drama: an onscreen counter ticks off long afternoons of positioning or aimless dope-smoking, and Walters, who himself served seven months in one such facility upon turning twenty, clearly wants us to feel the days either skipping by or dragging their feet. That we willingly stay the course is down to these kids, who prove very nearly as assured and compelling as the seasoned pros in this cast: Nyuot's nervy, darting eyes at once convey a deep-seated vulnerability, a growing institutional intelligence, and an acute awareness of the myriad threats awaiting Troy beyond the frame. Graham is as dependable as ever as the one person on this wing who might actually be looking out for Troy's interests, but he also proves central to the film's most unexpected scene late on; Sharon Duncan-Brewster, as Troy's addict mother, gets a remarkable amount of backstory - and hurt - across in her semi-occasional appearances in the visiting room. When Love does finally reach for anything so contrived as plotting - plucking some clandestine video footage of Troy and Kristian in the lavs out of the air - it's not wholly convincing; there's also at least one stone-cold correctional cliche in the closing reels that Walters and his ensemble have to work hard to finesse in any way. Still, Animol is technically sharp, pursuing a look that goes distinctively against the generic grain. Rather than the washed-out frames that have become a feature of the starkly naturalistic institutional drama (including Wasteman), Walters and emergent cinematographer Tasha Back are forever alert to colour and texture, most prominently in one expressionistic dream sequence, but also in a very choice tableau of the facility's exterior at night - the inmates seen illuminated or silhouetted in their cells, like windows in an advent calendar - which strikes the eye as more cinematic yet. It's a more than respectable directorial debut - but Walters has served enough time in the British film industry to know it's your second film where a director really makes their bones: as in lock-up, only the strongest survive.

Animol is now playing in selected cinemas.