Riding the crest of a thousand memes about ending up in A&E with splinters in unutterable places, Wicker is a bawdy new comedy that fulfills all expectations. For one, we do indeed discover what fornicating with a sentient wicker basket might look like. But Wicker also complicates the gag with a touching portrait of how patriarchal expectation has robbed romance of the use of its tongue – in all meanings of the phrase.

At its centre is a gender-swapped Pygmalion fairytale, set in some vague configuration of Ye Olde England, in which the unmarried Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) – lonely, yes, but also sick of everyone’s snide comments – commissions the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage, unmatched in delivering the character’s florid soliloquies) to make her a husband.

He emerges in wicker Alexander Skarsgård form, via some astounding practical prosthetics, who is kindly in soul and mighty in downstairs package; he says things like, “you are the reason I live and breathe”, which is literally true – though the film takes care to consider his autonomy in all of this. Wicker Husband will break the marital bed that night and fix it the next day.

Directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson have a refreshingly unfussy but sexy way of shooting their romance scenes. There are no candles. No mewl of the violin. A cow moos outside. Both bed and husband sound out a seesaw creak. Yet the film trusts that Colman’s performance can communicate every unexpected wave of pleasure that hits her character.

Skarsgård’s a dream get for the role. There are very few actors who, recognising their own heartthrob status, have embraced it in such playful and unexpected ways, from last year’s BDSM romance Pillion to the feral viking cry of The Northman (2022). A lot of the actor’s appeal is that he can exude deep sincerity from a place of ironic detachment, a contradiction in theory that helps guide the film’s more unexpected turns.

Wicker, when we’ve all had our kinky kick, expands beyond the confines of the Fisherwoman and Wicker Husband’s bed chambers to the repressed and dissatisfied villagers next door. Men are known only by their job titles and women only by their relation to said men. Marriage rituals involve a collar around the neck and a goat chomping on a carrot penis.

It’s a strange and amusing world conjured by Tóth András Dániel and Godena-Juhász Attila’s costumes and Renátó Cseh’s sets, then given a touch of the Yorgos Lanthimos thanks to cinematographer Lol Crowley’s cold but beautiful images and Anna Meredith’s jaunty score.

The arrival of the Wicker Husband has made the men of the village look bad. They’re jealous, then angry, then sad, because they’re incapable of expressing their genuine love for their wives. Most affronted of them all, however, is the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki). She’s beautiful, immaculately dressed, and entirely subservient to her husband (Nabhaan Rizwan); seeing the Fisherwoman’s rejection of traditional femininity – she stinks of fish and earns her own keep – rewarded with a handsome, doting husband in her eyes tips the scales entirely the wrong way.

Debicki is wonderfully exacting in the role, a counter to Colman’s bold vulnerability (Richard E Grant also crops up as a mad doctor at one point, delightful here as on The Celebrity Traitors). Wicker ridicules the patriarchy but shows great empathy for all those afflicted by it. Even the Fisherwoman must learn how easy it is to succumb to the paranoia and distrust woven deep into the fabric of love. It’s a lesson as hard as a wicker erection.

Dir: Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. Starring: Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, Richard E. Grant, Peter Dinklage, Ben Ashenden. 15, 105 mins.

‘Wicker’ is in cinemas from 30 October