We review the movie ‘Wicker’, one of this week’s releases

Paradoxically we find in “Wicker” -wicker in English- what the seventies horror classic promised and did not deliver “The Wicker Man”with Christopher Lee, and its 21st century remake, with Nicolas Cage: a true wicker man. Based on the story “The Wicker Husband”by Ursula Wills, only fourteen pages long and originally published on the Internet, the second feature film by the couple formed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson develops between the historical, the magical and the satire.

Set in a medieval-looking town with questionable customs, such as the placing, amid laughter in the midst of the revelry, of a creepy metallic necklace around the bride’s throat on her wedding day, the film has the charm of the construction of a particular world, as attractive as it is fearsome and populated with suggestive characters; an apparently distant microcosm, but which is nothing more than a grotesque distortion of misogynistic attitudes still in force.

In this framework, a smelly and unattractive fishmonger played by an Olivia Colman who does not fall into sentimental Manichaeisms, achieves through the magical arts of a basket maker – a Peter Dinklage who has a great time – the creation of a spectacular wicker husband who adopts the massive forms of a candid Alexander Skarsgard who bursts into the community unleashing envy and uncovering the dark side of the most distinguished members, like a perfidious Elizabeth Debicki.

Also worth mentioning in the exemplary cast is Richard E. Grant, in the fun and brief role of a doctor, and Phil Daniels, the former teenage protagonist of “Quadrophenia”like a nasty butcher. And it is that in “Wicker” The unusual experience of the protagonist is as important as the humorous revelation of the miseries of a (timeless) community affected, as in a Western, by the arrival of a beneficent stranger. There, the Fischer-Wilson duo knows how to maintain, with some exceptions, the balance between the particular and the general.