When Young Mistress passes these tests, she is forced to marry the titular "wooden man", a wood-carved statue of her late fiancé.

When the affair is discovered, Kui is banished from the mill, and Madame Liu has the Young Mistress's legs broken to prevent escape.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Edward Guthmann, however, found the comparison to Zhang's earlier films as diminishing The Wooden Man's Bride.

[3] Other critics felt that Huang had more than matched his contemporaries, in the process creating the "most visually stunning, emotionally powerful western since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven".

Stephen Holden of The New York Times noted that the film was a "methodical, cool-headed expose of an oppressive sexual code that treats women as chattel and metes out brutal punishment to violators".