Film reviews: I Love Boosters | Wicker

I Love Boosters (18) ★★★★

Wicker (15) ★★★

Part fashion industry satire, part absurdist heist movie, part wacky sci-fi comedy about dialectical materialism, the class struggle and workers’ rights, Boots Riley’s new film I Love Boosters fizzes with so much energy and so many ideas it’s almost too much to take in in one viewing. Revolving initially around a gang of shoplifters (Kiki Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige) as they boost outlandishly-priced streetwear from a luxury fashion chain run by a billionaire designer (Demi Moore) who thinks nothing of appropriating other people’s ideas, the film sets its skewed tone quickly with cartoon-like visual gags, frantic music, kooky production design and a revenge plot involving a score to steal a new top-secret line of suits worth $100k each.

But it soon takes an even wilder left-field turn with a teleportation plot that connects the plight of Palmer’s character Corvette with that of sweat-shop workers in China, while also diving into horror territory with the arrival of a soul-sucking sex demon (played by LaKeith Stanfield) and a twist that gets under the skin of late-period capitalism in a gruesomely literal way. There’s a lot going on, in other words, and, as with Riley’s 2018 debut Sorry to Bother You, entire theses could be written about everything it’s trying to do. But it’s also a thrill to see a film so committed to its radical ideas that it doubles down on its own gonzo craziness instead of selling out with sops to the mainstream.

A self-styled fable about lust, sexual frustration and gender inequality, the Middle Ages-set Wicker puts an entertainingly smutty twist on the folk horror genre with a satirical black comedy about an ostracised woman whose unexpected marriage to a man woven from willow unleashes a torrent of jealousy in her village. Olivia Colman takes the lead as the aforementioned outcast, a fisherwoman who doesn’t seem unduly bothered about the daily taunts she faces from the villagers – until, that is, a bizarre marriage ritual anoints her the next in line to tie the knot, awakening her in the process to her own loneliness. Seeing no solutions to her dilemma in the local drunkards, she commissions a mystical basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to make her a spouse and is promptly rewarded with an attentive and devoted sex-god-of-a-husband who just happens to be made out of twigs.

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That he’s played by Alexander Skarsgård helps the writing-directing team of Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer sell us on their high-concept premise, which comes on as a sweet and bawdy love story, with Colman adding layers of complexity to her character as she experiences happiness for the first time and Skarsgård oddly soulful under some inventive make-up effects. As the second half transforms into a more knowingly savage take-down of the villagers (played by Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu and Richard E Grant among others), the story doesn’t quite hang together as well, though it does build to an amusingly spiky finale.

​I Love Boosters and Wicker are in cinemas from 30 October

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