“Being Straight Is Great, Actually” is the original title of an opinion piece published in the Times earlier this year, by Magdalene Taylor, a senior editor at Playboy. Timing is everything; the piece ran on May 31st, on the precipice of Pride Month, and that gave it an incendiary lift. The essay was addressed to a certain kind of heterosexual woman, one with whom we’ve all become familiar. A loathing has rotted her heart, a loathing directed at the subpar men who surround her, and at herself. She is a smart woman. She is enraged by the recession of gender equality, she is appalled by the prominence of Andrew Tate and his misogyny gospel, and she is alarmed by the proliferation of the trad wife. She has removed herself from the apps, and perhaps from men altogether. And yet she still wants them, these men, or at least the idea of them. She keeps wanting them, all while not wanting them.

Taylor cheerily argues against this prevailing “bad mood” that is all the rage these days—that mood being heteropessimism, a cultural condition first explored, and named, by the writer and scholar Asa Seresin, in The New Inquiry, back in 2019. Seresin was trying to work out a knot. He used the framework of Afropessimism, which he described as “a school of thought that takes antiblackness to be the transhistorical structuring force of the world,” to understand an emergent form of internet-era ennui: “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” Coinage is deadening. “Heteropessimism” had the appeal of new jargon, and it launched about a million confessionals that, maddeningly, had the effect of narrowing questions about desire—political desire, romantic desire, what have you—instead of opening them up.

The second title of Taylor’s essay, the Times’ fix after the initial blowback, is “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men.” This permissiveness—the permission to desire—is one theme of the new film “Wicker,” a romp directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. The movie’s essence is Chaucerian; the pacing is taut, jaunty, like a fairy tale, helped along by a twinkling score composed by Anna Meredith. In a medieval village, men are named by their occupations—the Tailor (Nabhaan Rizwan), the Bottle Washer (Gustav Lindh)—and the women, by their affiliation to their husbands—the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), the Bottle Washer’s Wife (Marli Siu). The film delights in the slippage between satire and historical accuracy, laying out before us a wheat-colored, barely civilized civilization. Lewdness rules. The people are ritualistic. The men are boors. The women are sour. At marriage, the maiden bends her head and joyfully receives a collar, this universe’s version of a “ring,” and the union is pronounced “man and his wife.” At the reception for one such marriage, that of the Bottle Washer and his wife, the whole town spills out to celebrate. One woman, an outcast, the Fisherwoman, played by Olivia Colman—a performer whose gift of interpretation allows her to enliven the one-dimensional, matronly characters she often chooses to play—looks off scoffingly, but not uninterested.

“Wicker” is a hybridized movie, a comedy/horror/romance. It basically sustains itself on a pun, that of hard wood, but its recombinations of the joke don’t get old. We meet the Fisherwoman on the outskirts of town, by the water, where she expertly guts and cleans her fish, shelters in a modest hut, and pisses in a bucket by her bed. The women in town ridicule her for her fish stench, which is also the smell of being unchosen. But isn’t the Fisherwoman, a kind of sister to Chaucer’s working woman—the five-times married Alison, the beloved first sovereign woman of English literature—content to be alone? The film, which is based on a short story by Ursula Wills called “The Wicker Husband,” tees up a proto-feminist refusal: “Love seems more a burden than a prize,” the Fisherwoman replies to her bullies, who sarcastically ask if she has yet to catch a lover. What do they know about love? The time for the familiar beat, the wish-fulfillment moment, soon arrives. The Fisherwoman appeals to the Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage), a fellow-outcast, to cure her loneliness by making her a wicker husband.

The op-ed-informed mind luxuriates in the resonances that this movie continuously lobs at it. And the lightness of “Wicker” prevents us from ever feeling lectured at. For too short a time, it is a sexy movie. Alexander Skarsgård—his enormous form covered in an intricately knitted suit meant to mimic the wave and stroke of soft willow, all the way down to lashes drawn from flax fibre—takes the role of the Fisherwoman’s husband as his raison d’être, because it is. He is a dream man because he is not a man; he is made from earth, never baptized in the swamp of patriarchy. Wicker Husband and the Fisherwoman enter a haze of domestic bliss. Their sex breaks the bed. Wicker Husband is happy to fix it, and also to fix the roof, after he notices water dripping from the ceiling and onto the Fisherwoman’s foot, as she lies underneath him spread-eagle. The sound of their pleasure wakes up the whole town; it awakens a jealousy, confusion, and anger not only in the other women but in the men, with both camps amazed that marriage could ever beget something like pleasure. A culture war explodes. I won’t spoil the conflict, but know that it is not too dissimilar from the zealotry you might see on a manosphere message board.

The monster romance is as old as Pasiphaë tricking the white bull into bedding her, but a spate of recent offerings, across film and literature, especially, have come to form something less like a genre and more like a drug. The straight woman is in crisis, we’re told, and so she lightens her pain by engorging herself on works of romantasy, in which nonhuman creatures satisfy very human wants. The author Sarah J. Maas, known for her “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series, which devotees lovingly claim as fairy smut, has sold more than a hundred million books worldwide. In Hollywood, a certain ur-monster is getting notably and problematically hotter: Jacob Elordi’s Creature, as painstakingly imagined by the fable obsessive Guillermo del Toro, in his version of “Frankenstein,” is a soulful giant, with a shattered-pottery body and a long stare. In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s millennial update, “The Bride!,” Christian Bale reinvents the creature as a tall, dark, and handsome cinephile. You can imagine a version of “Wicker” that’s braver, accepting of the implicit queerness of its central couple, that does not make this monster so debonair and forthright and Skarsgårdian, to communicate something more real about the grotesque, and how, counterintuitively, it drives attraction.

The straight woman must find her love. I wasn’t expecting to think of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece “Scenes from a Marriage” after I watched “Wicker,” but, as I left the theatre, it came up. Bergman’s exploration of divorce, of the emotional alienation a marriage can bring, was blamed, in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, for a spike in divorce rates. Causation seems dubious, but the point is about an outside force facilitating enlightenment. When the heteropessimist doubt begins to take over, in “Wicker,” when the Fisherwomen lets her mind be poisoned by rumor and gossip, the union starts to crumble. It’s the outside world, the ideological world, that introduces issues. “Wicker” ends with the promise of gender equality. As a marriage movie, it believes too deeply in the institution as a potentially liberating event in a woman’s life. The Husband is nothing more than hot; his undeveloped and cloistered psychology gives the marriage its ultimate peace. The film has to meet the needs of romance, but isn’t that the problem, the expectation that life moves like genre? ♦