There's something undeniably funny about watching the internet completely lose its mind over a man made of wicker.
For the past week, the trailer for Wicker, the new film by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, has been everywhere. TikTok, X, forums, group chats. Not because it tells an easily summarized story, but because it feels like something pulled straight out of a fever dream.
A lonely fisherwoman commissions a basket maker to weave her a husband out of wicker. The man comes to life. He is played by Alexander Skarsgård. He's incredibly attractive. He has sex. And the entire village begins to desire him.
On paper, it sounds ridiculous. On screen, surprisingly, it doesn't.
In recent years, audiences have repeated almost like a mantra that they're tired of sequels, remakes, and shared universes. Every unexpected success is celebrated as proof that there's still room for original ideas. Then a film like Wicker, based on The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills-Jones, comes along, and the first collective reaction is to wonder, quite literally, how sex with a wicker man would actually work.
It's a perfectly contemporary response.
The internet no longer distinguishes between promotion and participation. A trailer isn't just supposed to convince people to buy a ticket. It has to become a conversation, a meme, a joke rewritten thousands of times. The film begins long before it reaches theaters.
Wicker has found exactly that balance. It's strange enough to go viral, yet serious enough not to feel like a simple punchline.
The casting tells its own story.
Alexander Skarsgård is one of the last Hollywood actors who still seems to choose roles according to personal instinct rather than algorithmic logic. In recent years he's played fetish bikers, Amish bartenders, Vikings, tortured men, and near-mythical figures. A husband made of wicker feels like the natural next step.
He himself joked that his dream was never to play Hamlet, but to have "wicker nipples." It's obviously a joke, but it also reveals a different way of existing within the industry. In a system that increasingly flattens everything, there are still actors who seem to enjoy making themselves impossible to predict.
The prosthetic suit created by Wētā isn't there simply to impress. It transforms Skarsgård into something simultaneously human, object, and fairy tale creature. A presence that belongs more to folklore than contemporary fantasy.
The most interesting part, however, isn't the costume.
Beneath the surface of jokes, innuendo, and memes, Wicker seems to tell an ancient story. A woman rejected by her community literally builds the ideal man. When he arrives, he doesn't just liberate her. He forces an entire village to confront desire, envy, and possession.
It's the structure of a traditional folk tale. The materials have changed, but the themes haven't.
The filmmakers themselves have described the film as an allegorical fable rather than a straightforward romantic comedy. Watching the trailer, it's hard not to believe them. The humor is obvious, but underneath it lies something more unsettling. Collective desire never produces happiness alone. It also produces competition, imitation, and chaos.
There's another interesting detail in the online reaction.
Many of the most shared comments make fun of the film. Others openly say they want to see it precisely because it seems impossible to categorize. Today, those two reactions are essentially the same.
In recent months, several original films have found an audience precisely because of how strange they are, because they offered an image that no franchise could ever produce.
A man woven from wicker becoming the sex symbol of the autumn movie season belongs squarely in that category.
We still don't know whether Wicker will be a great film. By definition, a trailer isn't enough. But we already know one thing: for a few days, millions of people stopped talking about the latest sequel and started talking about a medieval romantic fable starring Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage, and Alexander Skarsgård.