She plays a depressed fisherwoman. He plays a man made of wicker who is solely dedicated to her pleasure. How did the actors feel about this strange, emotional connection – and what did Colman draw from her own marriage?

Another year, another raunchy comedy-drama in which Alexander Skarsgård is the answer to a social outcast’s erotic dreams. “I fucking loved Pillion so much!” says Olivia Colman, reliably sweary straight out of the gate, as she brings up last year’s British indie hit starring Skarsgård as a leather-clad dom with a timid traffic warden as his submissive. “And when they kissed at the end … Aww.” The 52-year-old Oscar-winner for The Favourite gives a mock-sniffle and a little shake of her frizzy grey locks, then pretends to dab her eyes.

Seated beside her in a London hotel room and wearing a bright orange “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, Skarsgård tilts his head appreciatively. In Pillion, it was Harry Melling who had the privilege of being ravaged by the 50-year-old Swedish actor. Now it is Colman’s turn in Wicker, an earthy adult fairytale filmed in Budapest and set in a medieval village populated almost exclusively by British comic actors who converse in language both archaically formal (“Happy to transact with you”) and bluntly colloquial (“I’d better fuck off”). Among them is Phil Daniels as a leering butcher and Richard E Grant as a doctor who is even more inept at his job than Grant was as a Celebrity Traitor.

Colman stars as a depressed and bullied fisherwoman in medieval England. Fortunately, Peter Dinklage’s basketmaker delivers the answer to her dreams – an Alexander Skarsgård made of wicker

The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.

The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki.