In his new film, Alexander Skarsgård plays a man made of wicker – but he’s not the Wicker Man.

No one’s complaining about the bees in the utterly bonkers trailer for Wicker. According to the distributor’s YouTube description of the trailer, it stars Olivia Colman in “an audacious comedic fable about sex, marriage, and the absurdities of social convention, [telling] the wholly original love story of an ostracized fisherwoman (Colman) who commissions a husband to be made by the local basketmaker (Dinklage). When her wicker husband (Skarsgård) proves more spectacular than she ever imagined, his soulful spirit and unique prowess awaken something inside her, setting off a wave of jealousy, fascination, and upheaval that threatens the very fabric of village life.”

In the trailer we see the Colman’s character, fed up with the patronizing looks and teasing about her single state that she gets from the women in her village, go to visit Dinklage’s character.

“I want you to make me a husband,” she says without preamble.
“Be at the chapel in a month,” he says.”

The basketmaker weaves a magnificent man made of willow, and the two are wed. Before the wedding night, she dances through the village square with her groom, which gets everyone’s attention.

“I hear he’s strong as a tree and twice as hard,” one woman later remarks, pun certainly intended.

The wicker husband and his bride have an energetic honeymoon, breaking the bed and exciting (in one way or another) the neighbors. And that’s when we see there is trouble brewing, despite the couple’s obvious wedded bliss, or rather because of it.

Wicker was written and directed by Alex Huston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson, who based the screenplay on the short story The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills-Jones. Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, Richard E. Grant and Ella Bruccoleri also star.

Wicker premiered at Sundance Film Festival last January and will open in select US markets on October 23rd, with a wider release on October 30th, when it also opens in the UK.