A red carpet premiere with a difference
Olivia Colman arrived at the BFI London Film Festival on Thursday for the UK premiere of Wicker — and found herself at the centre of one of the most unlikely internet frenzies of her career. The Oscar-winning actress, appearing on the red carpet at BFI Southbank in a long black dress with a draped shawl and a new longer grey hairstyle, posed alongside co-star Alexander Skarsgard, who wore a gold suit, as the fantasy romance made its British debut.
It was the culmination of a festival run that began with the film's world premiere at Sundance in January, where it received a warm reception from audiences and critics. But it is what happened after the trailer dropped that has truly set Wicker apart: a tidal wave of memes, steamy jokes and bewildered reactions that turned an art-house oddity into a full-blown online phenomenon.
A large woven wicker sculpture, evoking the life-size wicker husband at the heart of the film
Credit: Rab McMurdo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The oddest love story of the year
The premise is, by any measure, gloriously strange. Colman plays a fisherwoman — a self-sufficient, solitary woman — who commissions a basket maker to craft her a husband out of wicker. The life-size creation, played by Skarsgard, comes alive through practical effects, and the two improbably fall in love.
The film is based on the short story The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills-Jones, adapted for the screen and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. The supporting cast is starry: Peter Dinklage plays the basket maker, Elizabeth Debicki appears in a supporting role, and Ella Bruccoleri and Gustav Lindh round out the ensemble.
Colman has spoken warmly about the film's emotional core beneath the absurdity. Her character, she explained, was content alone but discovered that being loved made life better — calling it, in her words, "a very lovely story about how to do it well". It is a sincerity that sits at the heart of the film's gamble: asking the audience to take a romance with a man made of woven branches entirely seriously.
When the trailer broke the internet
Few films this year have been memed into existence quite like Wicker. The trailer's combination of explicit romantic imagery and an unapologetically bizarre premise sent social media into overdrive, with shocked and baffled viewers sharing clip after clip alongside steamy jokes about the film's central relationship, as the BBC reported.
The reaction has been a marketer's dream: curiosity without spoilers. The memes intensified public interest while revealing little about how the story resolves, and the film now carries genuine mainstream momentum into its theatrical release — an unusual fate for a project this eccentric, in an industry being reshaped by deals like Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. takeover. In an era when studios spend fortunes manufacturing viral moments, Wicker managed the real thing by accident.
"This has never happened to me before"
Colman, one of Britain's most decorated and recognisable actors, admitted the scale of the reaction had caught her completely off guard. "This has never happened to me before," she said — a striking admission from a performer whose career has spanned an Oscar win, The Crown and years of acclaim.
She also used the premiere to praise the British film industry for backing projects as unusual as Wicker, hailing its willingness to champion "odd" films that might never get made elsewhere. It is a defence of the ecosystem that produced the film — and of a kind of risk-taking that, as this week has shown, can pay off in the most unexpected ways.
From Sundance darling to awards-season curiosity
The critical reception so far suggests the film may be more than a meme. Wicker currently holds a reported 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, earned a four-star review in the Daily Mail, and was described by one critic as "absolutely wonderful", according to early round-ups. The Times awarded it four stars, declaring Colman "ridiculously good" and concluding that the movie was entirely hers — "four stars with her, two stars without".
That blend of festival pedigree, critical warmth and viral notoriety has positioned Wicker as one of the more talked-about curiosities of the autumn awards season. Whether its unconventional love story translates into mainstream box office success will be decided in the coming weeks — but few films arriving in cinemas this month carry this much conversation with them.
When and where to see it
Wicker opens in US cinemas on 23 October and arrives in UK cinemas on 30 October, where it carries a 15 age rating and runs for 105 minutes, with release details confirmed. Its journey from a January Sundance world premiere to one of the autumn's most talked-about releases — Radio Times lists it among October's essential UK releases — has been anything but conventional.
The rollout then goes international: Sweden, for instance, will get the film on 20 November through distributor Scanbox Entertainment — a reminder that the meme storm has been a global one, and that audiences well beyond Britain and America are waiting to see whether the wicker husband lives up to the legend the internet has already built around him. For British audiences, it lands in a crowded autumn schedule — but as Colman's week has proved, few releases this year come with this kind of advance word of mouth. More entertainment coverage is available in our Entertainment section, including this week's Glastonbury 2027 ticket news and our tribute to Eva Marie Saint. For the latest headlines, visit the Verity homepage.
