Online consensus seems to be either Oh, hell no! or Gotta see that!
Featuring Olivia Coleman, Alexander Skarsgard, Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, Richard E. Grant, and Peter Dinklage. Looks like it’ll be out in late October.
It seems that the suit is 100% practical and wearable, with minimal digital manipulation. I worry about splinters.
An ostracized fisherwoman commissions the local basketmaker to weave her a husband, but when her wicker creation proves unexpectedly extraordinary, his presence ignites jealousy and upheaval that threatens their quiet village.
One viewer (the only reviewer so far) gives it a 10/10:
The protagonists disturb you at first and gradually charms [sic] you as the film progresses, similar to the village characters in the film. It’s a creative and fantastical approach to gender roles. This film will make you groan, cringe, laugh out loud, and cry. I cant say more. I just recommend you don’t read anything about the plot or watch the trailer. Just go into it blind.
Not to get off topic. But I think nothing can ever recapture the movie experience of sitting down midway through The Wicker Man with my wife as she is about to turn off what up until that point had been a mostly boring police procedural mystery film, and suddenly watching it go off the rails in the most Nicolas Cageiest of ways possible.
I genuinely saw this thread and assumed it was some sort of The Wicker Man ‘origin story’. So, how Christopher Lee’s character got into all that, erm, weird stuff.
It looks intriguing and the cast is stellar, but… I gotta be honest, I know I’m going on nothing but having watched the trailer and read the short story so I could be all wrong, as well as being a humorless woke numpty or whatever, but the fundamental premise of Wicker is making me a bit twitchy. To wit:
I don’t think the concept of creating a sentient sexbot who is unquestioningly devoted and grateful to its human “mate” for its very existence stops being problematic just because the sexbot is male instead of female. Or because it’s wicker and magic in a fairytale with the rest of the cast in bonnets and jerkins etc. instead of a nanotechnology AI android in the near future, or whatever.
ISTM that if this was a male incel fisherman who commissioned an ensouled wicker wife from the local basketmaker, we’d be giving some side-eye and having some conversations about consent and objectification stereotypes and Pygmalion and Galatea and whatnot. The discourse this film is aiming for seems to be more along the lines of ”tee-hee his wooden penis is very hard and he is very adoring and all the other wives are jealous”.
(Also, WHY tf does a custom-built wicker “husband” have to be made at least half a meter taller than his human “wife”, and broad in proportion? That’s just unnecessarily wasting material resources in the service of tired cultural gender stereotypes of exaggerated male physical dominance! Wicker doesn’t grow on trees, you know!… oh, wait. Never mind. Still true about the stereotypes, though.)
Anyway, I haven’t seen the movie and it may turn out that the filmmakers have in fact thoughtfully addressed all these issues and I’m way out of line, but at present it’s bugging me a bit.
I don’t know how true the movie hews to the story (it looks like it is quite close, from the trailer) but I can say that’s not exactly all that’s happening in the story. Yes, he is literally created for her, but a lot more happens in the course of the tale. It’s very good, a wonderful modern fairy tale.
Suffice to say, the thorny issue of mere wicker sexbots is definitely addressed.
In the original story, at least, this is intentional on the part of the old basket-maker, to make a husband that is “[all the] things women like”.
That was my takeaway from the trailer’s line “He has his days, I have my days, and we have our nights” (from memory). They each have their own lives outside of their marital bliss.
I wonder if he’ll become a real boy at the end, but I hope not.
No, But him becoming a real boy is never the point. He never once expresses a desire for that. And there’s also a wicker baby and a “wicker” lady (not for him) in the mix by the end.