BRIAN VINER reviews Wicker: Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård are splendid together... this romantic fantasy is a lot of fun!

Olivia Colman can't be faulted for the range of roles she accepts. Soon we will see her as silly Mrs Bennet in a new TV version of Pride and Prejudice, but in the meantime, in the irrepressibly bawdy, engagingly quirky Wicker - which was screened at the London Film Festival last night - she gets her own handsome Mr Darcy. It's just that he happens to be made out of wood.

In this hugely entertaining adaptation of The Wicker Husband, a short story by the British author Ursula Wills-Jones, Colman plays a humble fisherwoman, who lives on the edge of a medieval town of uncertain location and intense parochialism. 

It's the sort of vaguely Germanic place that could be home to a folk tale by the Brothers Grimm, although the accents are provincial English and not even the Grimms got as raunchy as this.

Fisherwoman, as everyone knows her, is a dowdy spinster with a pronounced limp, habitually ridiculed by the townsfolk for her unfortunate pong. 'Got tench, got gudgeon,' she cries as she carries her wares through the streets, but her whiff always precedes her. Maybe it's high gudgeon.

A wedding ceremony shows us that wives are treated like chattel, which doesn't stop the town's virgins excitedly joining a traditional game to see who will be the next to marry. To her amazement, it's Fisherwoman. 

BRIAN VINER reviews Wicker: Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård are splendid together

But instead of choosing from her limited and not-so-eligible options, she visits the Master Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) and asks him to craft her a spouse.

A month later, she is introduced to her Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgard), who is not only courteous, thoughtful and wonderfully handy around the house, but also fantastic in bed. 

There are some echoes in all this of other fairy tales, especially Pinocchio, although it's not the length of her new companion's nose that preoccupies Fisherwoman.

When the noise of their lovemaking reaches the ears of the town's other newly-weds, they assume someone is being murdered. And when the marital bed breaks under the strain, Wicker Husband promptly asks for a hammer, so he can fix it. 

He's a paragon of manhood, which inevitably prompts acute and lustful jealousy in the women who for years have treated Fisherwoman with contempt, among them the Tailor's Wife, played with terrific hauteur (and a decent Yorkshire accent) by Elizabeth Debicki. Their menfolk are similarly envious, not of her luck but of his virility.

Writer-directors Alex Houston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson allow plenty of opportunities for the supporting cast to shine, with an uproarious cameo for Richard E Grant as a doctor almost as affably clueless as Grant himself has been in the BBC's Celebrity Traitors. 

Dinklage is quite glorious as the Basket Weaver, who repeatedly seems on the verge of singing rather than speaking his flamboyant monologues, making me wonder whether the West End might be ready for the musical version.

But it is Colman who steals the show, beautifully conveying Fisherwoman's downtrodden loneliness, then her joyful smugness, although that in turn gives way to anxious paranoia when gossip about the Wicker Husband's fidelity begins to circulate and the story takes a tragic turn. 

Colman steals the show, beautifully conveying Fisherwoman's downtrodden loneliness, then her joyful smugness

Skarsgard too is splendid, giving wooden performances a good name with the help of superb work in the special effects department

Skarsgard too is splendid, giving wooden performances a good name with the help of superb work in the special effects department.

At the start, Wicker is introduced as a fable. What is it telling us? That we mustn't so readily believe the worst in people? That we shouldn't demonise outsiders? 

Whatever, the pleasure of this film lies more in its substance than its message, and in the many nods to other stories about synthetic creatures, such as Frankenstein. 

I was also reminded of another dark romantic fantasy, Guillermo del Toro's 2017 masterpiece The Shape of Water.

That won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Wicker is not quite in the same league, but it's a lot of fun.