Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen — Into a Wicker Dumpster Fire
There’s something tragic about watching a great filmmaker try to recreate past glory. Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man(1973) is a masterpiece — a strange, haunting blend of folklore, sex, and religious dread that birthed a thousand horror cults and Nicolas Cage memes. The Wicker Tree (2011), on the other hand, is like watching your eccentric uncle try to reenact his youth at a Renaissance fair after three bottles of mead.
It’s supposed to be a spiritual companion piece to The Wicker Man. Instead, it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when nostalgia and delusion elope in a low-budget Scottish field.
The only real “burning” in The Wicker Tree isn’t the wicker structure — it’s the ashes of your hope that this film will be any good.
The Plot: Jesus Takes the Scenic Route to Scotland
Our story begins in Texas, which already feels like a threat. Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol) is a born-again pop singer with all the charisma of a karaoke night pamphlet. She and her fiancé, Steve (Henry Garrett), are part of a group called “Cowboys for Christ,” whose entire mission is to bring the Good Word to “heathen areas” — which apparently means Glasgow.
Yes, these two American missionaries fly to Scotland to convert the locals, which is like trying to sell hamburgers at a vegan festival. Their first attempt at evangelism fails miserably — probably because nobody in Glasgow needs saving by a woman who looks like she fell out of a Chick-fil-A commercial.
Enter Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish, looking like a Scottish Bond villain who misplaced his kilt) and his wife Delia (Jacqueline Leonard), who invite our naïve Christians to their quaint little village of Tressock. Naturally, this village has a secret, and spoiler alert: it’s not good plumbing.
The Village People: Pagan Edition
Tressock is your standard folk-horror village — full of smiling weirdos, suspicious fertility rituals, and enough flute music to make your ears file a restraining order. The villagers are infertile due to a nuclear plant, which, in a rare moment of self-awareness, the movie seems to acknowledge as a metaphor for how dead the script is.
Beth and Steve agree to participate in the May Day festival as the May Queen and the Laddie, unaware that these titles translate roughly to “pagan sacrificial lambs.”
Meanwhile, Steve — who, despite his purity ring, has the willpower of a potato — cheats on Beth with a naked local named Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks). Lolly’s job in the movie is simple: seduce, giggle, and get pregnant by the dumbest man in Scotland. And she delivers, both figuratively and, by the end, literally.
Our Heroes, Ladies and Gentlemen: Dumb and Dumber for Christ
Beth and Steve are easily the most aggressively clueless protagonists since the cast of Birdemic. They wander into every trap with the blind faith of a toddler following candy into traffic.
Beth, in particular, might be the least self-aware character in cinematic history. She sings Christian pop songs that make VeggieTales sound like Led Zeppelin. At one point, she breaks into an evangelical number about purity, while the camera cuts to Scottish villagers watching with a mixture of confusion and existential despair.
You almost start rooting for the pagans — not because they’re right, but because they at least seem capable of basic human reasoning.
Sir Lachlan and Delia: The Pagan Power Couple Nobody Asked For
Graham McTavish deserves better. He’s a commanding actor — you’ve seen him in Outlander, The Hobbit, and Rambo— but here he’s reduced to spouting pseudo-mystical dialogue like, “The earth must be fed!” while wearing tweed. His wife Delia looks like she should be managing a bed and breakfast, not orchestrating human sacrifice.
Their entire motivation boils down to “We want babies, so let’s murder some tourists.” Which, honestly, sounds like a rejected X-Files plot.
The Detective Subplot That Exists for No Reason
There’s also a detective named Orlando (Alessandro Conetta), who’s undercover in the village investigating reports of a pagan cult. He discovers that the villagers worship the goddess Sulis, which in this film mostly involves drinking wine and making bad decisions.
Orlando has sex with Lolly, because everyone in this movie does, and then disappears for half the runtime. His subplot feels like it wandered in from another film — possibly one that didn’t suck.
The Ritual: Less Burning, More Yearning (for the End Credits)
Eventually, May Day arrives, and Steve is “chosen” to be chased through the woods and torn apart by villagers. It’s meant to mirror the famous ending of The Wicker Man, but instead of tension and dread, we get… horse costumes. Lots of horse costumes.
Meanwhile, Beth is drugged by the butler (Clive Russell), who accidentally kills the family cat in an earlier attempt to spike her milk — a scene so unintentionally funny it deserves its own spin-off.
Beth eventually wakes up, discovers Steve’s death, and goes full Jesus Gone Wild. She sets fire to the wicker structure, killing Sir Lachlan inside. Then she’s captured, killed, and preserved in a room full of dead May Queens like a human Pinterest board.
The movie ends with Lolly giving birth to Steve’s child, and Delia praying to the setting sun. If you’re wondering whether this conclusion ties up any narrative threads, rest assured: it does not.
From The Wicker Man to The Wicker Meh
Hardy clearly wanted to recapture the eerie, satirical tone of his original masterpiece. But The Wicker Tree feels like The Wicker Man’s taxidermied cousin — lifelike at first glance, but hollow and stiff the moment it moves.
Where The Wicker Man was subtle and sinister, this film is goofy and tone-deaf. It can’t decide whether it wants to be horror, satire, or Touched by an Angel: Pagan Edition. Instead, it’s a bizarre hybrid of southern piety and Celtic cosplay.
Even Christopher Lee makes a cameo, briefly appearing as an “Old Gentleman” in a flashback that lasts about 45 seconds — just long enough for him to realize he made a terrible mistake.
The Music: When Hymns Attack
Let’s not forget the soundtrack — a symphonic war crime that alternates between Christian power ballads and Celtic folk music. Every time Beth starts singing, you can feel your soul trying to leave your body.
It’s supposed to contrast American evangelism with ancient paganism, but mostly it just makes you wish the villagers would start burning microphones instead of people.
The Verdict: Stick with the Original, Burn the Sequel
Watching The Wicker Tree feels like being trapped at a church retreat that accidentally wandered into a Druid festival. It’s a film that wants to explore deep themes — faith, fertility, hypocrisy — but ends up exploring the outer limits of cinematic embarrassment.
Robin Hardy once created one of the greatest folk horror films of all time. Here, he creates a film that feels like a parody of himself, complete with bad wigs, worse accents, and a moral compass that spins faster than the Maypole.
Final Rating: 🔥🐴✝️ 1 out of 5 Purity Rings
Because The Wicker Tree doesn’t just fail to honor The Wicker Man — it lights that legacy on fire, dances around the ashes, and then forgets why it started dancing in the first place.
