Review: For a Medieval Therapy Session, The Green Knight Casts a Seductive Spell

David Lowery’s film exerts a haunting pull, but it’s only superficially more daring and enigmatic than its source material.

The Green Knight
Photo: A24

A self-consciously revisionist take on Camelot lore, writer-director David Lowery’s The Green Knight opens with Gawain (Dev Patel), depicted as a pure and noble-hearted true believer in the ideals of chivalry, receiving a sexy wakeup call from his girlfriend, Essel (Alicia Vikander), who splashes him with water and playfully announces, “Christ is born.” This Gawain is no hero yet, just a directionless layabout who lives with his mother (Sarita Choudhury), spurns church, and generally seems to have no idea who he is or what he wants out of life. That’s the rough equivalent of a Superman story kicking off with a bedraggled Clark Kent feeling aimless in the wake of digital media taking out the Daily Planet.

The analogy to superheroes is apt here, and not only because the film’s portentous imagery at times recalls the stentorian mythologizing of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Lowery has refashioned his source material, the eerily captivating 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, into what’s essentially a comic-book origin story, in which a normal man achieves greatness through conflict with a seemingly invincible enemy.

In this case, that foe is the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), a menacing creature who appears during a Christmas celebration in the court of Gawain’s uncle, King Arthur (Sean Harris), to challenge one of his men to a bizarre game in which the participant must take a whack at the Green Knight with his weapon of choice. In a year, that same man must travel to meet the monster and face his axe. Gawain, in a rare moment of courage he soon comes to regret, volunteers for the challenge, swiftly beheading the monster with the help of his uncle’s sword. But the Green Knight simply picks up his head and, possessing Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie) and channeling his thundering voice through her body, reiterates the challenge.

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The film flashes forward a year, when Gawain, nervous and unsure of himself, sets off to find the chapel where the Green Knight dwells. In the original poem, Gawain’s journey is almost perversely condensed into just a few stanzas, in which scenic landmarks and fantastical occurrences are briefly mentioned but not described. Lowery has taken these few lines and inflated them into the heart of his film, turning Gawain’s trek through the forests and hills of the English countryside into a hallucinogenic vision quest filled with giants, a talking fox, and a creepy encounter with St. Winfred, who asks the knight to fetch her head from the bottom of a pond. Meanwhile and by contrast, the poem’s hunting scenes, which fill stanza after stanza of lovingly described detail, are largely reduced by Lowery to a few shots of a tapestry.

Propelled by Daniel Hart’s nearly omnipresent score, which crosses the disarming dissonance of Ligeti with the liturgical doom-groove of OM, the film exerts a haunting, though not quite hypnotic, pull. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo captures the eerie emptiness of the setting’s countryside, evoking the biting winter coldness without resorting to the usual visual cliché of leafless landscapes drenched of color. On the contrary, The Green Knight features some truly intoxicating color grading, which not only adds an optical pop to the film’s finely crafted images, but also creates evocative visual rhymes, linking, for example, the warm glow of a lonely bonfire in one scene to the amber hue of Gawain’s scarf in another.

As he’s shown in previous films like A Ghost Story and The Old Man & the Gun, Lowery is a clever metabolizer of influences, adept at drawing on a variety of cinematic influences without resorting to pastiche. Here, he pulls inspiration from the eye-popping symmetrical psychedelia of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, the chaotic medieval overload of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God, the surrealistic sense of scale of René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, and the druggy folk-horror of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England. But The Green Knight is ultimately more inward-looking than those reference points might suggest, less interested in grandiose spectacle than in a methodical, if largely allegorical, exploration of Gawain’s psyche.

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Lowery’s film also smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, resulting in a work that’s only superficially more daring and enigmatic than its source material. In essence, Lowery’s film takes an age-old text and transposes into it an eminently contemporary subject: the failson, the son of privilege who, when confronted with the pressures of adulthood, ends up frozen in adolescence. Lowery spells out the film’s themes of ambivalence and fear explicitly in a final-act fake-out (shades of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) that retroactively resolves most of the film’s most tantalizing riddles. If, in the poem, Gawain’s quest is a strange test of his commitment to chivalry and honor, here it’s basically one long therapy session.

Score: 
 Cast: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Barry Keoghan, Ralph Ineson, Erin Kellyman  Director: David Lowery  Screenwriter: David Lowery  Distributor: A24  Running Time: 125 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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