Wicker

I really don’t understand the high praise this is receiving. A lot of the writing feels like something ripped straight out of an outdated British comedy series, which is especially disappointing considering how much potential this story has. There are some genuinely humorous and heartwarming moments scattered throughout, but they’re buried beneath such an inconsistent tone and uneven pacing that I found it increasingly difficult to care about any of these characters. Half the film seems to be devoted to jokes about lusting after someone who isn’t your partner, or fucking a wicker man, and there’s very little else going on beneath the surface. No meaningful character development, no particularly compelling conflict beyond petty jealousy, and very little to suggest that any of these people have learned anything by the time the credits roll. Without getting into spoilers, the motivation behind the climactic action makes absolutely no sense to me. It immediately makes one of the characters almost impossible to forgive, and yet the remainder of the film proceeds as though nothing particularly egregious has happened. The complete lack of consequences is infuriating. The one supposed consequence we do get in the finale falls on a single man, which feels like a laughably inadequate resolution to everything that came before it. I can’t help but feel that much of this stems from the decision to stretch a 14-page short story into a feature-length film. At 1 hour and 45 minutes, there simply isn’t enough material here to sustain the runtime, and it really feels as though the filmmakers wrote an entirely separate film’s worth of filler and wedged it between the remnants of the original story. Whenever the film returns to the source material, there’s a sense of purpose and momentum, only for it to veer off into another stretch of largely inconsequential comedy or bland drama. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s distracting, disjointed, and makes the whole thing feel inconsistent. Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, and Marli Siu are the only performers who consistently impressed me. The rest of the cast often feel as though they’re performing in an entirely different production, with a theatricality that rarely translates well to the screen. And I really, really despised Peter Dinklage in this. I’ve never found him particularly convincing as an actor, and this performance does absolutely nothing to change my mind. The same accent, the same cadence, the same insufferably pompous delivery. And why is he talking to himself so much? By the end, I was practically begging for his scenes to be over. Visually, the film is undeniably beautiful. There are some lovely compositions throughout, but pretty cinematography can only do so much when it feels entirely disconnected from the story being told. The camera never seems particularly interested in revealing anything about these characters or drawing us deeper into their world. The shots look nice, certainly, but I struggled to find any real motivation behind them beyond their looks. What frustrates me most is how little the film does with its own premise. There’s so much potential here to explore misogyny, the absurdity of historical cultural norms, and the ways in which people justify their own selfishness, but the film seems content to make a few shallow comedic observations about these things before moving on to the next joke. Nothing is truly developed with much real conviction, and whatever interesting ideas might be lurking beneath the surface are ultimately sacrificed for the sake of a fairly standard romantic comedy. Ultimately, I found this to be a remarkably shallow film with a handful of redeeming qualities. It has an intriguing premise, some genuinely fun moments, and a few performances worth appreciating, but very little else to offer. For a story with this much potential, it’s frustrating to watch it settle for so little. A pretty film with some good jokes, I suppose, but not nearly as clever or insightful as I was hoping for.