Would You Marry a Man Made of Wicker? A Silly, Serious Look at Fictional Non-Human Romances

There is a part in the Wicker trailer when a villager remarks that the new husband in town is as strong as a tree, and just as hard. The joke lands because he is, in fact, a tree. Or rather, a great deal of willow, woven into the shape of Alexander Skarsgård and delivered to Olivia Colman’s door like an enchanted parcel.

It is the funniest premise of the autumn. It is also, if you squint, one of the oldest stories we have. Long before anyone thought to build a boyfriend out of basket material, people were writing about women and men who fell for partners made of ivory, water, fur and code. So it seems only fair to ask the question the film keeps daring us to ask

A basket, a marriage, and a standing ovation

Wicker comes from the writing and directing duo Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story “The Wicker Husband”. Colman plays a fisherwoman on the edge of a small seaside village, mocked for being single and for smelling permanently of her own catch. Fed up, she pays the local basket weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, to make her a husband. A month later he arrives: soft-spoken, devoted, entirely woven, and rather more accomplished in the bedroom than any of the village’s actual men. Chaos, jealousy and a certain amount of collapsed furniture follow.

The creature effects come from Wētā Workshop, the New Zealand outfit better known for The Lord of the Rings and Avatar, which is why the film looks far more expensive than its plot summary suggests. Elizabeth Debicki plays the tailor’s wife, chief among the sneering.

Critics who saw it at Sundance in January did not agree on much. The New York Post found it dark, strange and genuinely wonderful. IndieWire enjoyed the bawdy, Chaucerian energy but felt the film never quite found a purpose beyond its premise. TheWrap was blunter, calling it wearisome despite the novelty of the central image. Collider took it more seriously than most, reading it as a comedy about a village where every woman is named only for the man she belongs to, and one woman who refuses.

Wills-Jones published the story back in 2008. It reached the stage first, as a folk musical at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury in March 2020, with a six-foot puppet by Finn Caldwell standing in for the husband and flowers growing from his weave. Lockdown closed it almost immediately. It returned in 2022 to strong reviews. The film opens in limited American release on 23 October and goes wide a week later, with UK dates expected in the autumn.

Ovid got here first

Everything about Wicker has a Roman ancestor. In Book X of the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells of Pygmalion, a sculptor so disgusted by the women around him that he carves an ivory figure instead and promptly falls in love with it. Venus, touched or possibly just amused, brings her to life.

One detail worth keeping: the statue is never named in any surviving ancient source. Galatea arrives centuries later, most likely from Rousseau, and stuck so firmly that she now sounds classical. The woman made to order did not even get to keep her own name.

That is the uncomfortable seam running under all these stories, and Wicker knows it. A commissioned spouse cannot really consent to the commission.

The film tries to soften this by insisting the wicker husband has a will of his own, though several reviewers felt the transaction still hangs over the romance. What makes the fable land differently is who does the ordering. Ovid’s sculptor wanted a woman with no opinions. Colman’s fisherwoman wants somebody who will simply be kind to her, which is a lower bar and a sadder one.

The strange company Wicker keeps

The non-human love interest is a well-populated field, and the oddness is almost always doing a job:

            •           The Shape of Water (2017). A mute cleaner and an amphibious man, and a Best Picture win at the 2018 Oscars. The creature is the only character who does not treat her silence as a defect.

            •           Poor Things (2023). Yorgos Lanthimos on what happens when the reanimated woman declines to be grateful about it.

            •           Warm Bodies and Lisa Frankenstein. The comic end of the spectrum, where the dead boyfriend is essentially a metaphor for emotional unavailability with better make-up.

            •           The Bride! Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take, set in 1930s Chicago, in which the Creature asks for a companion and a murdered woman is brought back as the Bride. Jessie Buckley plays her, and the film is reportedly interested in what she wants rather than what he ordered.

            •           Selkie wives and swan maidens. The folk versions, and the bleakest. A man hides the sealskin, the wife stays, and everyone pretends this is a marriage.

            •           Her (2013). No body at all, which turned out to be prophetic.

Why women are reading monster romance

Monster romance sat in self-published corners of the internet for years before it became a genuine commercial force, helped enormously by Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians and the enthusiasm of BookTok. It now shares shelf space with the biggest romantasy titles.

The most common explanation from readers and psychologists is straightforward. A creature has no idea what human beauty standards are. He cannot compare his partner to anyone, because he has no reference points, no ranking system and no opinion about her dress size. The appeal is being wanted without conditions attached, which is not a small thing to want.

The less flattering reading is that the genre has quietly set the bar for male behaviour somewhere near the floor. A partner who listens, tells the truth and does the washing up should not require magic. That the fantasy currently involves an eight-foot minotaur says something about the state of the ordinary alternative.

The market is shifting again, in any case. The Bookseller’s 2026 predictions suggest readers are moving towards darker and more morally complicated stories, so the cosy monster may have peaked just as the cinema caught up.

The part that stopped being fiction

Here is where the fable stops being safely medieval. Commissioning a perfect companion is now a consumer product. Replika users have been holding virtual weddings for years. Character.AI counts its monthly users in the tens of millions. A 2026 study from the Wheatley Institute found that roughly one in seven partnered young adults regularly talks to a chatbot designed to simulate a romantic partner, and most had not mentioned it to the person they actually live with.

Researchers are careful rather than alarmed. The evidence suggests these tools can genuinely ease loneliness, and also that heavy reliance on them tends to track with poorer real relationships. Nobody yet knows which way the arrow points.

So, would you?

Probably not, on the practical grounds alone. Splinters, damp, fire safety, the small matter of the man who made him.

But the fisherwoman’s answer is more interesting than yes or no. She did not wait to be chosen, and she was punished for it, not by her husband but by everyone watching. The wicker man is the silly part. The village is the serious one, and the village is still there.