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.