A Medieval Spinster, a Man Made of Sticks, and a Surprisingly Steamy Romance
The film everyone has been meme-ing about finally has a release date in sight. Wicker, starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård, has spent months living rent-free on the internet – primarily because one character describes Skarsgård’s wicker creation as “fuckable furniture,” a phrase that apparently unlocked something in a significant portion of the online population. But the husband-and-wife writing and directing team behind the film, Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, are quick to point out that the movie is doing considerably more than delivering basket-related fantasy content.
It’s a film about what society does to women who don’t fit.
Colman plays a character known only as the Fisherwoman – an outcast in a medieval farming village, shunned for her smell and her spinster status. When the community’s cruelty reaches a breaking point, she commissions herself a wicker husband. The chaos that follows cuts in two directions: for the Fisherwoman, it’s the first time she experiences unconditional love; for the villagers, it’s the first time they’ve encountered a man who refuses to uphold the patriarchy, which apparently a medieval farming community finds deeply destabilizing.
How Olivia Colman Ended Up in Bed With a Wicker Man
Getting Colman attached to the project required a certain amount of strategic information management. When Wilson and Fischer first approached her, the intimate scenes were framed as purely comedic – played for laughs, nothing more. “Don’t worry, the sex scenes are just going to be funny,” Wilson told Colman early in conversations about the role. Fischer is blunter about what would have happened otherwise: “She would have never signed up for it,” he said. Wilson finished the thought without hesitation: “Had she known.”
What they didn’t anticipate was how the scenes would actually land once cameras were rolling. The intimacy between Colman and Skarsgård ended up being considerably more affecting – and more genuinely erotic – than the directors had planned for. Wilson described filming the intimate scenes as a highlight of the entire production. What started as strange smut, her words, evolved into something the filmmakers themselves didn’t see coming.
This is the tension at the center of Wicker‘s unusual tonal identity: it wants to make you laugh, but it also wants to make you feel something real. Wilson and Fischer are aware that audiences are connecting with the film at a level deeper than the memes suggest. The wicker husband gag is the entry point. What’s inside is a commentary on loneliness, on how single women are perceived and punished, and on what it actually means to fall in love – even with someone technically constructed from plant material.
What “Strange Smut” and Wholesome Actually Look Like Together
The word “wholesome” appearing in the same description as “strange smut scenes” is exactly the kind of contradiction Wicker seems designed to live inside. Wilson and Fischer built the film around Colman’s Fisherwoman as someone the audience understands before they even sympathize with her – an outsider navigating a community that has decided her smell and her unmarried status are reasons for exile. The medieval setting functions less as fantasy escapism and more as a slightly exaggerated mirror: the specific mechanics of how the village treats her are old, but the logic behind it isn’t.
Skarsgård’s wicker husband, meanwhile, becomes the film’s moral center without being capable of moral reasoning in any conventional sense. His refusal to participate in patriarchal social structures isn’t ideological – it’s structural. He’s wicker. He simply doesn’t have the same social programming the village men do, which turns out to be the most radical thing imaginable in this particular setting. That the villagers find this deeply threatening says everything the film needs to say without spelling it out.
Wilson and Fischer described the film as hilarious, which it clearly is – the premise alone guarantees a certain level of absurdist comedy, and the “fuckable furniture” line becoming a cultural shorthand before the film even released suggests audiences already understand the joke. But the directors seem most interested in what happens after audiences stop laughing long enough to notice what the film is actually arguing. That the Fisherwoman’s first experience of unconditional love comes from someone she literally built herself is either very sad or very hopeful, depending on how you’re watching.
The Meme Was Never the Whole Story
There’s something worth noting about how Wicker arrived in the cultural conversation – not through traditional awards-season positioning or prestige marketing, but through women online thirsting over a fictional man made of sticks. Wilson and Fischer built something with enough comedic surface area that it spread on its own terms, and now they’re in the position of gently redirecting attention toward the film’s more substantial concerns: the specific cruelty aimed at women who live outside expected social structures, the way communities enforce conformity, what gets called love and what actually qualifies.
Olivia Colman playing an outcast Fisherwoman in a medieval village who falls for a wicker construction is, on paper, a comedy pitch. That it also functions as a sharp social critique – and that the sex scenes turned out genuinely steamy rather than purely ridiculous – suggests Wilson and Fischer were making something more calculated than the memes imply.
The question now is whether audiences who showed up for the “fuckable furniture” joke will stay for a film that wants to make them uncomfortable about how they treat the women in their own lives. Colman almost didn’t sign on because nobody told her exactly how the intimate scenes would feel. The villagers can’t handle a husband who refuses to follow the rules. The Fisherwoman spent her whole life being punished for a smell she couldn’t control.
