The Wicker Man (2006)

Neil LaBute's 2006 reimagining of The Wicker Man arrives bearing the heavy inheritance of a folk horror classic it never quite manages to honor or escape. Nicolas Cage, as Officer Edward Malus, wanders a Pacific Northwest island populated by neo-pagans in homespun, bellowing about a missing child while the camera regards him with something close to fatigue. The film is a remake, and it knows it. It carries that knowledge like a stone in its shoe.

The most substantial progressive gesture here is structural. LaBute converts the original's patriarchal island into a matriarchal society governed by Ellen Burstyn's Sister Summersisle, a community of women who select their own stock and regard men as a disposable nuisance. This inversion puts gender power dynamics at the center, though the matriarchy is rendered as menacing and sacrificial, which quietly undercuts any reading of it as an empowering statement. The cast is white to a degree that borders on the geological, and the film carries no racial or ethnic texture whatsoever. No queerness surfaces either, despite a community organized entirely around fertility rites.

Elsewhere the cultural signals are faint. The island's failing honey harvest lends a whisper of ecological anxiety, but it is machinery for the sacrifice, not a sermon. The communal economy gestures at something anti-commercial without ever arguing the point. A line about Salem recasts the witch trials as pagan persecution, a flourish of historical tinkering that lasts a single scene. The islanders do explain their customs at length, though dread and absurdity win out over instruction. We are left with a badly received curiosity that earns its infamy through Cage's commitment and a bear suit. The classification stands. Few films have done so much with so little to say.