In terms of attention-demanding loglines, this year’s Sundance has a few. There’s body horror Saccharine, about a diet craze that involves eating human ashes, midnight movie Buddy, about a Barney-esque kids TV star who starts murdering children and then there’s Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant which, well, you can probably imagine.
But the annual “wait, what?” prize easily goes to offbeat fable Wicker, the story of a smelly spinster fisherwoman who commissions herself a husband made of, that’s right, wicker. While the film does have its expected amount of audience-provoking moments – wicker-fucking bringing the most noise both on and off the screen – to its credit, there’s an attempt to give us more than just easy shock value, something that can’t always be said for films in this often tedious category. Writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who previously brought mostly likeable alien invasion comedy Save Yourselves! to the festival, use their far-out premise to touch upon more of-our-world issues like the patriarchal cruelty of marriage and the special fury reserved for those who dare to live outside of the accepted rules. They succeed in brief flashes but ultimately, there’s too much here that doesn’t gel, a tonally uneven mix of mostly unfunny bawdy humour, dark fantasy and unlikely romance, too much wood but not enough fire.
Olivia Colman, who has had mixed results at Sundance ranging from The Father to Jimpa, is Fisherwoman, whose smell is as remarked upon as her singledom. She’s largely immune to the insults though, happily removed from the archaic gender roles that curse the local village. But after she sneers through another comically awful wedding, the jabs start to have an effect and rather than laughing it away, she asks the local basket-maker (Peter Dinklage, forever seeming like he’s on the verge of breaking into song) to make her a husband. A month later, he arrives.
There’s admirable ambition to the film-making, an intricately built world that meshes mostly old with bits of the new. Like many a fairytale, it’s a society built around the importance of men and the deference of women. Men are known by their profession and women by their relationship to their husband. The wedding ritual sees the man not offer his wife a ring but insist a collar upon her. Fisherwoman’s flagrant refusal to play by the rules, to take charge of her own life as breadwinner, throws the community into disarray. The women, led by Elizabeth Debicki’s spiralling queen bee, are both horrified and perhaps a little jealous, maybe even aroused by her new husband, played by Alexander Skarsgård in impressively handsome wicker (the effects work here is top notch). The men are worried about what his sexual and domestic perfection means for them and how their wives see them. Can anyone be happy anymore?
The central relationship is taken seriously enough for us to want more than we’re ultimately given. His arrival asks so many questions – what does he know, what does he want, what does she need, what was she missing – yet their early scenes are mostly based around comically vigorous sex (questions about splinters are also never answered) rather than any real development. He’s a commission designed to love her but there’s no exploration of what this means for their relationship and any agency he might want or need. These might sound like silly thoughts to have while watching a film like this but we’re meant to be emotionally invested in what happens. When conflict comes it’s mostly simple and soapy – has he shagged anyone else in town – and while there’s an effective scene of Colman breaking down while explaining the difficulties of sharing a life that had previously been lived alone (she remains one of our great criers) it’s too little too late. We don’t know anything of his reaction to the world or who he really is, just his blind devotion to her and when tragedy inevitably strikes, there’s just no real attachment to any of it. I was thinking about how invested I was in the admittedly more dramatic but even less verbal relationship between Sally Hawkins and the fish man in The Shape of Water. There are ways to make us care in fantastical romances such as this, I just don’t think Fischer and Wilson were able to find them.
It’s hard to imagine many other working actors taking on the fisherwoman role, Colman often seeming like the rare actor whose career has allowed certain films to exist. I haven’t loved her choices of late (The Roses, Jimpa, Wicked Little Letters) but she’s never less then entirely devoted to often far-out bits and she gives this her all even though I wish the script afforded her more depth. She knows how to oscillate between broad comedy and heart-wrenching drama but the film around her isn’t as adept. Like the dream husband at its centre, Wicker looks the part but there’s nothing underneath.
Wicker is screening at the Sundance film festival
