A husband made from a basket? Why women are going wild for freaky film romance Wicker

The trailer for this romantic fantasy created an online frenzy thanks to its bizarre premise, about a woman who commissions a basketmaker to weave her the perfect husband. Here's why it has really struck such a chord.

Forget about Prince Charming or the rebellious bad boy – there's a new romantic lead women are going wild for, and he is made out of wicker.

Back in August, the internet came alive with Gifs, memes and reels reacting to the first trailer of Wicker – a period romantic fantasy with perhaps the year's most bizarre premise. Based on the short story The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills-Jones, it stars Olivia Colman as an ostracised fisherwoman – known only as the Fisherwoman – who commissions Peter Dinklage's basketmaker to weave her the perfect husband. He arrives in the muscular woven form of Alexander Skarsgård, who caters to his new wife's every domestic need and sexual desire, as the village folk watch on with envy.

Suddenly, female and gay thirst for Skarsgård's Wicker hunk exploded online. Typical comments on the platform Threads included "Making my husband put a basket on his head to spice things up a bit" and "Insecure men thinking women only want muscles, meanwhile my entire feed is feral for a guy made out of a basket". 

Then there's been the enthusiastic online reaction to a Wicker promotional popcorn bucket created by Regal Cinemas and suggestively designed from a scan of Alexander Skarsgård's torso, which audiences can print out using a 3D printer at home.

The husband-and-wife film-making team behind Wicker, Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, tell the BBC they have been tickled by the responses and understand exactly why so many have fallen in lust with this magical pairing. "They're having sex, the roof is leaking, and he just says, 'I'm going to fix the roof' – then she has a screaming orgasm," Huston Fischer chuckles. "We made him very beautiful," adds Wilson, "but people are noticing that the best thing about the Wicker Husband is that he did something without being asked, and he doesn't require a pat on the back for it." 

Despite being set in a quasi-medieval fairytale village, the film is tapping into a very current conversation about the imbalance in heterosexual relationships, where women still shoulder much of the household and child-rearing burden. "At the time when we wrote it five years ago, I don't think domestic labour and its mental load was as much in the cultural conversation," says Wilson. She adds that she and Huston Fischer "have a child now so these domestic things you do end up having to negotiate, and now everyone has a lot more language for it",

In writing the script, she also wanted to address the "confronting" experiences of women who might be wary of dating and romance. "Entering into the dating pool can invite love into your life, but all of a sudden you're much more examined than you were before," says Wilson. "The Fisherwoman's journey is about what it is to be a woman in this world, struggling with your feelings about yourself and everybody else's feelings about you."

Wicker sits within the increasingly popular genre of monster-human romances, where relationships between predominantly female humans and male creatures are used to explore societal ills, desires and cultural expectations. From Beauty and the Beast, Shrek and The Shape of Water to Your Monster and Guillermo del Toro's recent take on Frankenstein, they attempt to dissect complicated feelings that people can have about the "monstrous" parts of themselves and the people they desire.

"There is a real hunger for seeing imperfect men especially if you're a heterosexual or bisexual [woman], and you're trying to square your attraction to [men] with the fact that they can be very dangerous," Gillian Daniels, author of her own monster-human romance novel Jenny Will Eat You Now, tells the BBC. She refers to the original Beauty and the Beast fairy tale written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, which the French novelist wrote after requesting a separation of property from her husband six months after they married.

"He was wasting their funds, he was monstrous to live with, so, in many ways, [Beauty and the Beast] became the definitive monster romance after her having this terrible relationship," says Daniels. "There is something there about us trying to square monstrosity, both internal and external, with a healthy hetero relationship or healthy relationships in general."

Wicker, however, features a very different type of "monster" – Skarsgård's Wicker husband is the perfect man in many respects, even if because of his unusual provenance, he arouses the suspicions of the rest of the village. "There's also monstrosity in the sense of you're a strange person, you're the weirdo, you're an outsider, but you're mostly innocent – these monstrous narratives are [varied]." In this respect, as a parable of desire and difference, Daniels thinks Wicker might particularly appeal to LGBT and neurodivergent audiences too.

In Wicker, the Fisherwoman herself is also a clear outsider, which Daniels appreciates: an autonomous woman who doesn't conform to her community's expectations of beauty, character, and behaviour. "This is not Beauty and the Beast," she notes, where Belle is imprisoned by the Beast before falling in love with him. "[The Fisherwoman] sought out this man to be made for her, she wants a perfect partner, and she hasn't been trapped into this."

Indeed, Wilson would never have adapted the short story if the Fisherwoman was presented as a Disney princess character like Belle: "The character is the ugly girl. She has a unibrow, she stinks, and she walks with one leg shorter than the other – that's what we were attracted to."

For Dr Indira Neill Hoch, assistant professor of communication at the University of the Pacific, Wicker has far more overlap with Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water than Beauty and the Beast. Like Wicker, the 2017 monster romance was the subject of comic and lust-filled memes when it was released. "Making Gif sets of a visually stunning film, or TikTok edits of that footage, is thirst presented in a way that is considered palatable," she says.

Neill Hoch also points to the similarities between Colman's Fisherwoman and The Shape of Water's heroine, Sally Hawkins' mute cleaner Elisa, who are women presented as not traditionally desirable. "There's something within this genre more broadly about the woman who is overlooked or the woman who doesn't fit into preconceived notions of what a desirable woman looks like, feeling this intense desire from a creature that both is and is not desirable," explains Neill Hoch. 

Yet, Neill Hoch notes that the Wicker Husband, The Shape of Water's Amphibian Man, and most other monstrous romantic leads are still humanoid beings, which makes it more acceptable for audiences to express and embrace their more unconventional passions: "They're undeniably sexy monsters."

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The Wicker film-makers have more recently become aware of the diverse genre of monster-romances, especially the niche literary sub-genre of "sentient object romances" about humans falling in love with conscious inanimate items. "There are a lot of them, and people love them," says Huston Fischer. "Some were even disappointed that The Wicker Husband is not just a basket."

In this respect, Skarsgård's Wicker Husband might in fact be on the more conventional side of this romantic sub-genre's unconventional leads. But Wilson loves that the film "is opening up a conversation about relationships, desire, marriage and how we treat each other". And she is happy that it includes a long, scintillating sex scene for audiences to fantasise about long after the credits roll: "Alex and I were blushing – but the most important thing was letting you know that she is enjoying herself."

Wicker is released in US cinemas on 23 October and UK cinemas on 30 October.

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