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| Where to Watch | IMDb |
If you like these things, then you'll like the film.
→ Fables. A story often featuring inanimate objects or animals as characters that teaches a moral or lesson.
→ Olivia Colman. Everyone likes Olivia Colman and if you disagree you are mistaken.
→ Eccentric dialects. The characters blend old English with modern euphemisms and, even if it doesn’t always land, the dialect gives the film a more heightened personality.
→ Folk tales (a sponsored bullet point).1 Jesse, the owner of DiabolikDVD, is a horror fan, and since Wicker is a folk tale, I thought it’d be fun for Jesse to share his favorite folk horror films. If you like his picks, give his shop a visit. It’s a great little corner of the internet (in your author’s humble opinion), and now, for a limited time, TNMN members get 10% on purchases $50 or more from Diabolik.
| 1 Sponsorships that don't suck. We only accept sponsorships for things we think you'll find cool, useful, or weird, and we build them into the newsletter to make them interesting instead of interruptive. |
What I think.
In this author’s opinion there aren’t enough fable-oriented films these days, or at least not nearly proportional to the radical volume of moral quandaries that we in 2026 seem to be so-often embroiled in. I’m not here to tell you that a film’s primary task is to teach us a lesson, but I do believe film is an unusually powerful medium for exposing some of humanity's most fatal and dooming qualities from which we can learn from. And that now is as good a time as any for works that can be described as both universal and important and eye-opening.
Alex Huston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson’s Wicker, punctuated by characteristically strong performances from Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage, and Alexander Skarsgård, is a smart and savvy exploration of tradition, conformity, marriage, and jealousy. And, above all else, it’s quite an entertaining romp, a film unafraid to have a little fun with the silliness of its central premise.
| oh, neat. |
A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."
→ Alexander Skarsgård wore a meticulously handcrafted “strawman” suit. “It would be weird to have a love story with just Olivia Coleman and a CG guy with tennis balls. No matter how good it looked, it wouldn’t be real. We knew it had to be real the whole time,” Alex Fischer said. Weta Workshop designed a wicker suit and makeup for Skarsgård to wear in the film, tailoring it to reflect the actor’s real facial expressions.
→ IKEA sells furniture made out of husband material. After the trailer debuted, IKEA capitalized on the film’s buzz. Their Australian Instagram account posted an image of a wicker bench alongside a price of $199. It was billed with the following claim: “made from husband material”.
No. 001 Cinenyms (Beta) Can you solve this week's puzzle? Find the films that share a connection. 
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