Olivia Newman finally has a follow-up worthy of her talent, and the first look at Wicker proves she’s not interested in making comfort viewing. The image dropped yesterday, showing a woman who looks like she’s been through hell and decided to redecorate it with her own trauma. This isn’t your standard haunted house fare. Wicker follows a protagonist who is isolated, mocked, and presumably very tired of everyone’s nonsense.
The still features our lead looking feral in the best way possible, surrounded by what appears to be rural decay and the kind of lighting that suggests cinematographers actually cared about the craft instead of just turning up the brightness in post. Newman, who previously directed Where the Crawdads Sing, has apparently decided that marsh drama wasn’t bleak enough and has pivoted to full psychological horror. Wicker promises to explore what happens when a community turns on one of its own, which feels timely in a way that makes you uncomfortable at dinner parties.
The film centers on a character who becomes the target of collective cruelty, because apparently small towns in cinema have never heard of therapy or minding their own business. If the image is any indication, this protagonist won’t be taking the abuse lying down. There’s a specific quality to the composition that suggests violence is coming, but not the cathartic kind where the hero wins cleanly. More like the kind where everyone loses something permanent and the audience leaves the theater questioning whether humanity deserves to continue.
Newman’s approach here seems deliberately confrontational. Wicker isn’t trying to cozy up to the audience with jump scares and easily digestible themes. It’s reaching for something nastier and more intimate, the cinematic equivalent of a splinter you can’t remove. The production design alone suggests a budget that went toward atmosphere rather than star power, which is always a promising sign when the director’s previous film made bank on moody wetlands and questionable legal proceedings.
Horror fans have been waiting for a proper follow-up to Crawdads that doesn’t involve Reese Witherspoon’s production company playing it safe. Wicker looks ready to deliver something significantly more disturbing than Nicholas Sparks with a murder charge. The isolation theme resonates because it feels earned rather than manufactured, the kind of loneliness that comes from actual social structures failing rather than just a protagonist who forgot to charge their phone.
The marketing strategy here is refreshingly minimal. One image, maximum dread, no explanatory voiceover trying to convince you this is “the scariest movie of the year” while showing every jump scare in the trailer. Wicker trusts its visual language to do the heavy lifting, which suggests confidence in the material and a target audience that doesn’t need hand-holding through narrative complexity. It’s the kind of debut that makes you check the locks twice and reconsider that invitation to your high school reunion.
Release details remain scarce, because distributors apparently enjoy keeping us in suspense as much as Newman enjoys making her characters suffer. But based on this single image, Wicker is already the most interesting horror debut of the year, assuming we don’t count whatever Blumhouse is churning out next week about a killer app or possessed smart fridge.
At minimum, it’ll give us something to discuss besides whether Jordan Peele has run out of ideas yet, and that’s worth the price of admission alone when the alternative is another sequel about a killer doll making quips.
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