The Wicker Man: Hilariously Hating Women Since 2006

Ahh, what can be said that hasn’t already been said about The Wicker Man? Almost nothing, according to my Letterboxd research - but we’re still going to try! On this our glorious bad-horror minisode day, we’re reviewing the absolute pile that is the 2006 adaptation of the folk horror classic. 

Hooray?

You bet your butt.

As usual, this episode is one giant spoiler and the following writeup will be a shorter, less detailed spoiler, so we highly suggest watching this masterpiece of awkward cinema before continuing.

To summarize as briefly as possible, The Wicker Man stars Nicolas Cage as Edward Malus, a police officer who is injured in a hilariously stilted traffic accident during the opening scenes. He receives a letter from his ex-fiance (Willow), who asks him to come to Summers Isle to help look for her missing daughter. He immediately ferries to the isolated commune, where the women of the island are overtly creepy and hostile. After an hour and fifteen minutes of increasingly frustrating dialogue, unpleasant and bizarre characters, and a pointless wild goose chase, Edward finds that Willow’s daughter is to be sacrificed in a ritual meant to bring back the island’s harvest. But alas, it’s all a trap that the entire island was in on - the real sacrifice was Edward Malus all along. He is tortured (which the audience can only see in the extended unrated version) and trapped in the titular giant wicker man and burned. Then Willow and another of the commune’s women return to the outside world to seduce more men, and thus the cycle continues.

So It’s About Cultists?

Ostensibly.

As a complete slap in the face to the source material (an excellent film of the same title made in the 70s), the characters and situations lack any discernible depth. There’s no belief to suspend because everything is so unbelievable - from the dialogue to the setting. There is zero subtlety to the cultists’ interactions with Edward, such that I figured out the ending plot twist about twenty minutes in. Under normal circumstances, this would be frustrating and dull.

Normal Circumstances?

Ah, yes, these are no normal circumstances. You see, Nicolas Cage is no ordinary man. He is a man who commits to his roles with every ounce of weird, manic energy he has. Does he shy away from hoarse whining or needless yelling in scenes that don’t necessarily call for them? Absolutely not - Nicolas Cage is no coward. 

What I assume The Wicker Man was supposed to be was a spooky film about a normal man being manipulated and eventually accosted by creepy cultists. But this version of The Wicker Man was written by Neil LaBute (we’ll get to him) and performed (nay, carried) by Nicolas Cage, so what results is a movie about a completely socially inept and occasionally violent man with rampant anger issues verbally abusing a town full of slightly left-of-center women with less than upstanding motives. 

Seriously, for the first half of the movie the women seem downright normal compared to Edward Malus. He’s needlessly cruel to everyone he meets, yells at almost everyone on sight, and his dialogue is almost as weird and cryptic as the cultists’. Sure, the cultists are deliberately frustrating and obtuse, but Edward is shouting obscenities way before any of that starts. One of the greatest failings of this movie is that it’s so easy to hate the protagonist, which removes any dramatic tension. You kind of want Ed to be burned in a giant wooden dude.

Is That On Purpose?

We’ve come to the conclusion that it both is and is not.

If you couldn’t tell, neither Olivia nor I are Neil Labute’s biggest fans. We both had similar but different experiences with his playwriting work while we were in high school and college, respectively. Though we read different plays, we both came to the independent conclusion that Mr. Labute is, perhaps, not the biggest fan of women. 

In a nutshell, his plays (and, in this case, movies) tend to center around women who ruin men’s lives for no reason. He writes deeply (and often unapologetically) flawed men who hurt women, sometimes purposefully. But rather than focus on the victims of his male characters, he instead decides to be revolutionary and focus on the feelings of the man who abused them. Then he gives these men reasons to hate the women in their lives and yell at them. Close the curtain. Hooray.

Some have argued that Labute actually hates men, which is why he writes them to be such monsters. But in the text, there’s never any attention paid to how these men’s actions emotionally affect the women in their lives. Instead, the women serve to fuel men’s angst and self-hatred. They are props against which the man experiences his own life. 

The same can be said for The Wicker Man, but to a strange and violent degree. The women of Summers Isle are caricatures of things that simply don’t exist. The entire film seems to be a treatise on the dangers of letting women be independent or, God forbid, live their lives without any influence from men. Edward Malus responds to this divergent way of life instantly and aggressively, even beating the ever-living shit out of multiple women in the final few scenes. These scenes play as sadistic wish fulfillment rather than justified self defense, as they come out of relatively nowhere. It felt as though I was watching the director take out his own aggression on women - which is funny, since I had no idea Neil Labute wrote and directed at the time.

The movie is hilariously bad. We had a blast laughing at the stilted dialogue and weird, overblown characters. And honestly, we’re relieved no one can take it seriously - given it’s a movie with deeply anti-women undertones. Or overtones.

Do yourself a favor and watch it with some friends (once you’re out of quarantine, that is). Grab a glass of wine and laugh your ass off at the adject shittiness. It’ll be the most fun you’ve ever had watching Nic Cage have a breakdown about a doll.