‘Screams on the level of a Taylor Swift concert’: horny romp Wicker gets the 4DX treatment

Olivia Colman’s steamy romance, where she plays a woman in love with a wicker man, becomes an unlikely pick for the theme park-like cinema experience

What does Olivia Colman’s hot sex with a basket tell us about heteropessimism?

‘I saw the script and went: oooh!’ Olivia Colman and Alexander Skårsgard on their steamy folk-horror movie Wicker

Since its introduction in the US in 2014, 4DX, the rollercoaster-ization of the theatrical experience, has primarily been the purview of action movies. And for good reason; the high-speed chases of a Fast and Furious movie, or repetitive battle sequences of an Avatar saga, translate easily to the moving chairs, scent machines and wind/water sprayers of the format, which more closely resembles an amusement park ride than cinema.

As a longtime fan of plane turbulence-style seat movement, I thought the immersive pleasures of 4DX – the second most-popular of so-called large premium formats in the US, behind Imax – reached its zenith in the summer of 2024 with the release of Twisters, a perfectly fine action movie about tornadoes that became an 11/10 experience when jostled in one’s seat to actual wind and rain. But a recent, unexpected candidate is finally pushing the bounds of 4DX again, making the most of the format’s potential to enhance the sensorial joys of cinema.

Enter Wicker, the horny medieval fable in which Olivia Colman’s Fisherwoman comes by a wicker-man husband, played by Alexander Skarsgård. A relatively small-budget ($10.5m), off-kilter love story from Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, Wicker made waves among curious cinephiles after its Sundance debut in January. But it is not what one might call a prime 4DX candidate. There is nary a mechanized vehicle in sight. Peasant characters don’t so much as ride a horse. Colman’s Fisherwoman at best lumbers about her village, and spends a decent amount of the movie scowling. But trailers did promise some bed-breaking sex between the Fisherwoman and her basket-ready man, prompting a joke on social media and Letterboxd: why not this in 4DX?

Black Bear, the film’s distributor hungry for a box office win (their first US theatrical release, the Sydney Sweeney vehicle Christy, bombed last year), wisely got in on the bit. And so it was that chants of “we want the wick!” filled the Regal Cinemas 4DX theater on a recent weeknight in Times Square, one of 60 “one night only” special screenings for those willing to expand the definition “experiential cinema”. (Due to demand – my screening, like most others, was entirely sold out – Black Bear ended up extending the one-night event to a full week.)

And it did not disappoint, though viewers did have to endure some very mild 4DX foreplay to get there. Wicker admittedly does not provide much for the chairs to do for the bulk of the movie, which largely consists of characters ambling about. (The scent programmers thankfully spared us the Fisherwoman’s oft-mentioned odor.) Still, I felt the pleasant knock of a door in my back, the light bump of floating down a river and, most evocatively, a splash of moisture when the Fisherwoman empties her chamberpot out the front door.

But things take a dramatic turn when Peter Dinklage’s master basket weaver delivers on his promise to make the Fisherwoman a Wicker Husband. Skarsgård’s comically tall, supposedly hollow wicker man exists for one reason and one reason only: to love the Fisherwoman, as physically and deeply as possible. Their bed-breaking post-marriage consummation scene – the reason for any of this hubbub – is probably the hardest I’ve laughed in a theater in years, and produced screams on the level of a Taylor Swift concert.

The women next to me, including one with her own homemade wicker basket dragged there by friends to help get over a breakup, snorted as the seats tossed us, along with the Fisherwoman, with every tightening of the wicker man’s luscious, finely woven shoulders. On the 4DX Richter scale of “fun” to “how are there legally no seatbelts”, this was off the charts. It turns out that the only thing better than losing handfuls of your popcorn to a mock Oklahoma tornado is losing your popcorn to every wicker thrust decimating Colman’s bedposts.

This roughly five minutes of sublime action substantiated the next several hours of conversation (many such cases!). Alas, most of Wicker takes place outside the bedroom, which left many in the largely female audience, as one townsman put it, “gagging for a solid log”. Still, it was overall incredibly inspired entertainment; whoever programmed the relatively tame, jackhammer taps for the jealous village normies’ unsatisfying sex, a trot compared to the main couple’s gallop, deserves an award.

The undeniable success of Wicker in 4DX (if many giggly “getting that wick” TikToks are to be believed) raises the question: is there a future for 4DX in erotic movies? Could we next see a Fifty Shades of Grey or Basic Instinct rerelease in 4DX? Could the format have saved Emerald Fennell’s should-be horny Wuthering Heights? Wicker may have opened fifth in the North American box office, but it has already achieved the improbable: unlocking new, tantalizing and ridiculous possibilities in the realm of cinema.