BRIAN VINER reviews Wicker: Alexander Skarsgard gives wooden performances a good name but Olivia Colman steals the show in this irrepressibly bawdy tale

WickerCert: 15, 1hr 45mins Rating:Next month we will see Olivia Colman as silly Mrs Bennet in a new TV version of Pride And Prejudice. In the meantime, in the irrepressibly bawdy, engagingly quirky Wicker she gets her own handsome Mr Darcy. It’s just that he happens to be made out of wood.This film is in no way related to the 1973 folk-horror classic The Wicker Man. It’s a hugely entertaining adaptation of The Wicker Husband, a short story by the British author Ursula Wills-Jones, in which Colman plays a humble medieval fisherwoman. Her village doesn’t seem like England, despite the provincial accents. It’s more the sort of vaguely Germanic place that could be home to a folk tale by the Brothers Grimm. Mind you, not even the Grimms got as raunchy as this.Fisherwoman, as everyone knows her, is a dowdy spinster with a pronounced limp, ridiculed by the villagers for her unfortunate pong.‘Got tench, got gudgeon,’ she cries as she carries her wares through the streets, but her whiff always precedes her. Maybe it’s high gudgeon.A wedding ceremony shows us that wives are treated like chattels, which doesn’t stop the village virgins excitedly joining a traditional game to see who will be the next to marry. Olivia Colman stars in the irrepressibly bawdy, engagingly quirky Wicker alongside Alexander SkarsgardTo her amazement, it’s Fisherwoman. But instead of choosing from her limited options, she visits the Master Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) and asks him to craft her a spouse.A month later, she is introduced to her Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgard), who is not only courteous, thoughtful and wonderfully handy around the house, but also fantastic in bed.There are echoes in all this of other fairy tales, especially Pinocchio. But it’s not the length of her new companion’s nose that preoccupies Fisherwoman.When the noise of their rampant lovemaking reaches the ears of the town’s other newlyweds, they assume someone is being murdered. And when the marital bed breaks under the strain, Wicker Husband asks for a hammer so he can fix it.He’s a paragon of manhood, which prompts lustful jealousy in the women who for years have treated Fisherwoman with contempt, among them the Tailor’s Wife, played with terrific hauteur (and a decent Yorkshire accent) by Elizabeth Debicki. Their menfolk are similarly envious, not of her luck but of his virility.Writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson allow plenty of opportunities for the supporting cast to shine, with an uproarious cameo for Richard E. Grant as a doctor almost as affably clueless as Grant himself was in the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors. Dinklage is marvellous as the Basket Weaver, a closeted gay man who fancies the Wicker Husband himself.But it is Colman who steals the show, beautifully conveying Fisherwoman’s downtrodden loneliness, then her joyful smugness, although that in turn gives way to anxious paranoia when gossip about the Wicker Husband’s fidelity begins to circulate and the story takes a tragic turn. It it is Colman who steals the show, beautifully conveying Fisherwoman’s downtrodden loneliness, then her joyful smugness, although that in turn gives way to anxious paranoiaSkarsgard too is splendid, giving wooden performances a good name with the help of superb work in the special effects department.At the start, Wicker is introduced as a fable. What is it telling us? That we shouldn’t demonise outsiders, perhaps? Whatever, the pleasure of this film lies more in its substance than its message, and in the many nods to other stories about synthetic creatures, such as Frankenstein’s monster.I was also reminded of another dark romantic fantasy, Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 masterpiece The Shape Of Water.That won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Wicker is not quite in the same league, but it’s a lot of fun.Wicker is in cinemas now.