There is a particular kind of courage in pitching a film about a lonely fisherwoman who builds herself a husband out of wicker, and a particular kind of reward in watching Olivia Colman play it straight. The film, Wicker, arrives in cinemas this week alongside Alexander Skarsgård, Richard E Grant, Peter Dinklage and Elizabeth Debicki, and it sets the tone for a season in which the strange is no longer hidden at the margins of the programme but placed squarely at its centre. Consider the company it keeps. In Nightborn, the Finnish actor Seidi Haarla plays a new mother who becomes convinced that her baby is a monster, a premise that turns the exhaustion of early parenthood into supernatural comedy, with Rupert Grint as the sceptical father.

In Primetime, Robert Pattinson takes on Chris Hansen, the presenter who fronted the American television hit To Catch a Predator, in a drama directed by Lance Oppenheim. And in I Love Boosters, the director Boots Riley, whose satirical instincts were formed in the politics of the American Bay Area, sends Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige out as shoplifters who take on the fashion industry's reliance on sweatshop labour, with Demi Moore as a formidable designer. The same appetite for contrast runs through the concert listings. London's Pitchfork festival, from 2 to 9 November, offers the Australian sample-masters the Avalanches and Nigel Godrich's new project Dragonflies, while the Californian band Papa Roach, twenty-six years after their breakthrough album Infest, tour arenas with undimmed fury.

Meanwhile, students at the Guildhall School stage a double bill of mid-century opera. What links a wicker spouse, a screaming infant and a nu-metal anthem?