Wicker... Or Be Careful What You Ask For When It Comes To a Spouse

November 2026

 

The five minutes of the irrepressible Richard Grant...

As the Mad Hatter village doctor...

Who would give Semmelweis a heart attack...

 

Was worth the price of the ticket for Wicker...

 

The tale of a fishwife who has a wicker husband made for her...

To silence the harpies in her 19th-century English village...

 

Which, of course, has a black pub owner and a South Asian tailor...

All living together in rural England ...

 

Can we please stop doing this....

 

When the filmmaker has otherwise put a lot of effort into verisimilitude...

 

Now Alexander Skarsgard...

Is hot...

And his wicker carapace...

Is a marvel of anatomical accuracy...

 

So props to the production design crew...

 

And he turns out to be the perfect husband...

For Olivia Colman as the fishwife...

 

But 6’2’’ Elizabeth Debicki looks like someone parachuted an Australian Amazon...

Into a village filled with tiny English men and women...

 

And her size and demeanor...

As the village girl boss... and mean girl...

Undermines the message of the opening sequence...

 

Which begins with a new bride having an iron collar placed around her neck...

As part of the wedding ceremony...

By her husband...

As a symbol of the patriarchal nature of marital relationships in this village...

 

Except...

 

Debicki as the tailor’s wife...

Is who really runs the town...

 

And if her husband put a collar on her the day they were married...

 

He would have had to use a ladder...

 

And her intimidating character reminded me of that old English saying...

 

“England is a prison for men, a paradise for women, and hell for horses”

 

Which I don’t think was the intended message of this movie...

 

But what was the origin of that phrase?

 

Well... it circulated in a series of books written in the 17th century by clergymen...

About the causes of marital discord in England...

 

Which reflected concerns that wives were not behaving properly...

  

And if you look at the real traditions of these small English villages...

That lasted well into the nineteenth century...

 

You see that they were really worried about “unruly” women...

 

There was the Cucking Stool...

Which was for women deemed to be particularly quarrelsome or argumentative...

Or who had disturbed the peace of their neighbors by abusive speech...

So they were tied to a chair and repeatedly plunged into a pond or river...

 

Or Rough Music....

Which was a ritual in which the community banged pots and pans as they paraded through the village...

Carrying effigies and chanting insults to humiliate a husband who was believed to be too dominated by his wife...

 

So there must have been a lot of unruly women about...

Because they were certainly worried about “scolds”

And the husbands who couldn’t control them...

 

So they developed rituals to punish and shame them...

 

And as a last resort... a husband could have a wife sale...

In the public square...

 

Now none of this would have been necessary...

If all these little women had been cowed by the culture into industrious and subservient handmaidens...

 

And done what they were told...

 

So there was obviously a disconnect...

Between what was considered the “natural” marital power dynamic...

And the perception of reality on the ground...

 

With much effort made to correct that...

 

And the wives in Wicker don’t seem to be too under their husbands’ thumbs...

They withhold sex...

And hector them...

And the men sit in the pub complaining about them...

 

And there was that strange marriage ritual with the new husband, a carrot, and goat...

 

So everyone is pining for the perfect spouse...

Who shows up in the form of the wicker husband...

 

Which makes the wives envious...

And threatens the husbands ...

Who are a lazy lot...

And so can’t compare...

 

Especially in an important way...

At which the wicker husband excels...

 

So the men seek out their own perfect wicker wife...

 

But all is not well with the woman with the perfect wicker husband...

 

And this is where one of the authors of that aphorism about women and horses in England comes in...

 

Robert Burton...

Had a lot to say about unhappy marriages...

In his book The Anatomy of Melancholy...

Written in 1621...

Which reads like it could have been the primer for this film...

 

For he writes that jealousy can make people miserable...

And a spouse can imagine infidelity where there is none...

Leading them to torment themselves as they try to interpret the other person’s behavior...

Which can lead them to deceive themselves... and act irrationally...

 

And that is exactly what happens to the once-contented fishwife...

 

So Wicker...

 

Is a parable about expectations...

 

With a very clever ending...

 

That sends the message...

 

Be careful what you wish for...

 

But this ending is done in such an unexpected... and visually dramatic way....

 

That it makes Wicker ...

 

Quite a memorable movie...

 

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