Wicker is an unorthodox love story from husband-and-wife filmmaking team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. Based on Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story, The Wicker Husband, it blends satirical folk fable with elements of the modern rom-com.
The film, set vaguely in the middle ages, follows a lonely fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who commissions a husband made from wicker (Alexander Skarsgård). Ultimately she falls in love with her handmade companion.
Colman’s fisherwoman is pitied for her unmarried status which is believed, at least in part, to stem from her perpetual fishy stench, prompting ridicule from the villagers. However, set against the comically bad marriages of those around her, she doesn’t seem to be in such a bad position, highlighting that, under patriarchy, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
The addition of a preternaturally devoted wicker husband to the village creates a new benchmark for marriage – one that stirs and intrigues the women and profoundly worries the men. It’s a bawdy yet astute exploration of what it means to challenge the heterosexual status quo.
Wicker arrives amid a remarkable boom in stories centred around relationships between the human and non-human. Monsters, aliens, dragons, demons and even household objects have increasingly moved from the margins of fantasy culture into the centre of popular romantic storytelling.
Films such as Lisa Frankenstein and A Useful Ghost have recently attracted smaller cult fan followings. And earlier successes including The Shape of Water, Warm Bodies and Edward Scissorhands have helped establish the idea that unconventional romantic partners can carry emotionally resonant mainstream narratives.
What has changed is not simply audience tolerance for the strange. Instead, our cultural ideas about intimacy, desire and romance are being reimagined.
From folklore to BookTok
Stories of humans forming relationships with beings they’ve made or transformed appear throughout mythology and folklore. Perhaps the most well-known example is the Greek myth of Pygmalion, in which a sculptor falls in love with Galatea, a statue of a beautiful woman that is brought to life.
There are countless other examples: stories appear in Jewish legends about beings made of clay called golems; northern European folktales tell of the selkies which can shapeshift between seal and human forms by removing or putting on their seal skins. And a whole multitude of fairytales hinge on magical transformations. Such narratives ask enduring questions about what makes someone human, what constitutes life and whether love can overcome radical physical differences.
Wicker’s romantic hero is clearly part of this long genealogy of made, crafted or transformed partners. But the character, while not necessarily or strictly monstrous, also speaks to the rising interest in “monster romance” within the rapidly expanding romance and romantasy book market.
Romantasy has become one of the publishing industry’s most successful genres and within it, readers have enthusiastically embraced relationships that cross species boundaries.
Katee Robert’s bestselling The Dragon’s Bride follows a relationship between a woman and a dragon-like being and Ruby Dixon’s wildly popular Ice Planet Barbarians series has crafted an entire romantic saga between various women and aliens from a frozen planet.
Monster romance fans have carved out their own niche on platforms like Instagram and, perhaps most significantly, TikTok’s BookTok, where they passionately champion their favourite books, couples and monster romance tropes.
Many of these books originated outside traditional publishing. Lauren Roberts’ Powerless and Jennifer L. Armentrout’s A Soul Of Ash And Blood were propelled by reader-driven recommendation networks and algorithmic infrastructure.
Communities like BookTok helped self-published authors build dedicated audiences long before major publishers recognised the commercial potential of the trend. As a result, stories once regarded as too strange or specialised for mainstream audiences are now bestsellers and the cultural appetite for the unusual has grown.
Rethinking romance
The popularity of monster romance has prompted critics to ask why readers are increasingly drawn to non-human partners. One explanation is that these narratives create distance from familiar romantic conventions.
By removing relationships from recognisable social realities, writers gain space to explore intimacy in new ways. Monster romances often challenge assumptions about things like beauty and gender expectations. The central conflict is rarely whether the monster is worthy of love; in fact, the stories frequently present the non-human figure as unusually attentive, loyal and emotionally available.
This dynamic has led some critics to connect the popularity of monster romance to “heteropessimism”: a growing cultural sense that conventional heterosexual relationships feel disappointing, unequal or exhausted.
Rather than abandoning romance altogether, audiences may be searching for alternative ways of imagining sexuality and emotional fulfilment. Here the monster becomes a vehicle for exploring possibilities outside of the patriarchal heterosexual partnership. (However, it must be noted that many of these romances are still broadly heterosexual, despite their play with gender roles and expression.)
But Wicker doesn’t just feature a non-human lover; he’s also a man-made one. Within our climate of heteropessimism and dating despair, stories about creating our ideal partner feel even more relevant. They examine the relationship between creation and desire, as well as asking what happens when people attempt to manufacture intimacy rather than discover it.
Digital technologies increasingly mediate romantic relationships. Dating apps encourage people to sort through seemingly endless options of potential partners while profiting from users’ desire for connection. And AI chat bots have introduced new discussions about the nature of companionship and the potential for relationships with digital beings.
Against this backdrop, the wicker husband embodies contemporary anxieties about loneliness and connection while also offering a fantasy of uncomplicated and unwavering devotion. The film emerges from a cultural landscape already primed for stories about loving the strange, the constructed and the non-human.
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Natalie Wall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
