Wicker (MA15 . 106 minutes)

A romance between a soft-bodied female human and an animated wicker man had to work for this film to succeed, and it does. It works so well that this spirited dark comedy is being called raunchy, and it has earned itself an MA 15 rating for its sex scenes. No way.

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It is risqué, for sure, but we hardly need to be cautioned about the sex here. Not when extreme violence has become the new norm during the decades since censorship of screen sex and violence relaxed in the 1970s, and while the brutality has intensified it barely warrants a warning.

Loosely based on a short story, The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills, it is the creation of writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer. The second feature from these filmmakers, also partners in life, who do a masterful job of combining narrative fantasy with elements that are all-too-human. It is set in a village somewhere in 17th century England.

The film is alive with sexual innuendo, a robust mix of dialogue that sometimes sounds a bit like Chaucer or a bit like Shakespeare, and a smattering of rude and quirky English idiom. Bawdy is the word for it.

Its success has a lot to do with the performance by Olivia Colman and the terrific ensemble of character actors. Colman brings so much, and then some, to her role as the soft-bodied woman, the lonely Fisherwoman.

A social outcast, she longs for companionship but is........

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