Wicker’s 4DX run turns a comedy about a woman and her woven husband into a physical experience for the audience. Film critic Kristy Puchko attended a 10:30 p.m. screening where the seats moved during the couple’s sex scenes. “The seats vibrated and bucked, yes, in rhythm with the Wicker Husband’s thrusting,” she said.
CJ 4DPLEX and distributor Black Bear arranged an October 28 event across 21 states and Washington, D.C., after the trailer prompted jokes about watching the bed-breaking action in motion seats. The screenings sold out, and the run’s been extended through November 4.
Olivia Colman plays a lonely Fisherwoman who orders a husband made from willow. Alexander Skarsgård plays her creation in a full-body suit.
“We thought this was a joke. But now it’s real. And it’s spectacular,” director Alex Huston Fischer said. His co-director Eleanor Wilson described the effect on the comedy: “The comedy is so much more hilarious while you’re being rocked out of your chair.”
Puchko’s screening also included sprayed water during rain, fog, theatrical snow and smells of wet grass, swamp and fire. The sensory effects stopped short of a fish smell.
The film expands on Ursula Wills’s 14-page story, The Wicker Husband. The story skips the wedding night; afterward, the husband says the bed’s broken and asks for a chisel.
Fischer said that passage prompted the filmmakers to show what happened. Wilson said the sex scenes were intended to be “played for laughs” and became “surprisingly more sexy than we thought.”
Colman said Skarsgård’s suit made filming them “less embarrassing for me because there wasn’t skin touching.” They also left out nudity, keeping the sex “all in our imaginations,” she said.