The Wicker Man II: The Wicker Tree (2011) is the film Robin Hardy spent decades trying to get made, and watching it is a genuinely sad experience. Not sad in the way The Wicker Man (1973) is sad, where grief and betrayal cut through you at the end. Sad because it's clear a filmmaker who once made something remarkable could not find his way back to it.
What The Wicker Tree is and where it came from
Hardy adapted the film from his own 2006 novel, Cowboys for Christ, and the story follows a similar template to the original: outsiders arrive in a remote Scottish community, the community has secrets, the outsiders don't leave. This time the visitors are Beth (Brittania Nicol) and Steve (Henry Garrett), two young American Christian musicians from Texas, sent to evangelize the heathens of the Scottish Lowlands. They end up in the village of Tressock, invited by the laird Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish) and his wife Delia (Jacqueline Leonard).
The setup isn't without promise. Two born-again Americans wandering into a pagan community is a workable premise. It reverses the power dynamics slightly, gives the missionaries a certainty that should make the audience wary, and McTavish is a commanding presence. But Hardy doesn't trust any of it. The film keeps undercutting its own tension with tonal lurches that feel not playful but confused.
Where the dread evaporates
Folk horror works when a community's rituals feel genuinely self-contained. You don't need to see every piece of the mythology. You need to feel its weight. Midsommar (2019) understands this. So does the original Wicker Man. In The Wicker Tree, the rituals feel like illustrations from a pamphlet rather than living practice. The villagers perform their rites on camera as if they've been positioned there by a director who needs them visible, not as people enacting something they believe in.
The film's biggest structural mistake is the death of Steve, which arrives early and should land as a gut-punch. Instead it plays as a plot development. The camera moves on. Beth continues. The film continues. By the time the climax arrives, the audience has been asked to feel something urgent without the film having built that urgency from the ground up.
Hardy reportedly filmed this on a budget that the production team described publicly as under £2 million. That's not inherently fatal. The original Wicker Man cost roughly £500,000 and is one of the finest horror films Britain ever produced. Budget isn't the problem. Structure is. Conviction is. The Wicker Tree never decides whether it's a dark comedy, a tragedy, or a proper horror film, and so it functions fully as none of them.
The cast is not to blame
Brittania Nicol gives a genuinely committed performance. Beth's unwavering faith, her cheerful certainty that Christ is on her side even as everything unravels, is the closest the film gets to the dramatic irony that made the original so devastating. McTavish does his best with dialogue that doesn't quite earn his gravitas. Christopher Lee appears in a brief cameo, playing a former laird in a scene that feels grafted in from a different and better film.
Jacqueline Leonard as Delia is worth noting. She builds a character who is clearly dangerous from the first frame, and she does it with a quietness that the film should have amplified. Instead, Delia is often sidelined when she should be central.
What the original understood that this doesn't
Sergeant Howie in the 1973 film is doomed precisely because he's right. His faith is genuine, his police instincts are correct, and none of it saves him. That irony is the engine of the original's horror. The audience is powerless because the hero is powerless. Beth in The Wicker Tree is similarly virtuous and similarly outmatched, but Hardy doesn't commit to her doom with the same mercilessness. There are moments where the film seems to lose its nerve.
Good folk horror requires a community that functions completely, a closed system the protagonist can't crack open no matter how hard they try. The village in The Wicker Tree has the surface details right. There are costumes, songs, May Queen ceremonies. But the community doesn't feel sovereign. It feels assembled. And that's the difference between a movie about folk horror and a folk horror movie.
The verdict
The Wicker Tree isn't unwatchable. It's worse than that: it's intermittently watchable in ways that remind you of what it could have been. McTavish's scenes with Nicol have a real charge. The Scottish Lowlands look genuinely beautiful and occasionally threatening. Hardy clearly loves this material. But love isn't craft, and revisiting your greatest achievement forty years later without the same ruthlessness that made it great produces exactly this: a film that stands in the shadow of the thing it's trying to become.
Robin Hardy died in 2016. The Wicker Tree is, unfortunately, his final feature, and it deserves to be seen at least once, as a cautionary document about the distance between intention and execution. Watch it after the original. Not before. Never before.