Wicker is an unorthodox love story from husband-and-wife filmmaking team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. Based on Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story, The Wicker Husband, it blends satirical folk fable with elements of the modern rom-com.

The film, set vaguely in the middle ages, follows a lonely fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who commissions a husband made from wicker (Alexander Skarsgård). Ultimately she falls in love with her handmade companion.

Colman’s fisherwoman is pitied for her unmarried status which is believed, at least in part, to stem from her perpetual fishy stench, prompting ridicule from the villagers. However, set against the comically bad marriages of those around her, she doesn’t seem to be in such a bad position, highlighting that, under patriarchy, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

The addition of a preternaturally devoted wicker husband to the village creates a new benchmark for marriage – one that stirs and intrigues the women and profoundly worries the men. It’s a bawdy yet astute exploration of what it means to challenge the heterosexual status quo.

Wicker arrives amid a remarkable boom in stories centred around relationships between the human and non-human. Monsters, aliens, dragons, demons and even household objects have increasingly moved from the margins of fantasy culture into the centre of popular romantic storytelling.

Films such as Lisa Frankenstein and A Useful Ghost have recently attracted smaller cult fan followings. And earlier successes including The Shape of Water, Warm Bodies and Edward Scissorhands have helped establish the idea that unconventional romantic partners........

© The Conversation