Film Review: The Green Knight
David Lowery casts a lush, verdant spell with The Green Knight
Nerds of fantasy and Arthurian lore rejoice, David Lowery’s latest film is a sumptuous translation of the anonymous Pearl Poet’s chivalric romance into visual splendor. A medieval epic unlike any other, The Green Knight grapples with the tensions between Christian honor and primordial pagan magic amidst a hero’s journey. Deliberate, visceral, and cerebral, the film rises above its sword and sorcery as true poetry in motion. Minor spoilers ahead…
Based on its ubiquity and Hollywood’s everlasting desire to retell its myth, Arthurian legend is a public domain goldmine. Honor-bound knights in gleaming armor, a fabled blade wrested from impassable stone, sword and sorcery on an epic scale - King Arthur’s story is one that has always resonated in popular culture, even if its recent adaptations have started to scrape the bottom of a well running dry. Filmmaker David Lowery (A Ghost Story, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) reinvigorates the lore with his sumptuous vision of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a sprawling 2,500-line chivalric romance with a single surviving manuscript from an anonymous author. Running sharply against the grain of swashbuckling knights and traditional medieval adventure, The Green Knight delves deep into the heart of Arthurian fantasy, conveying a flawed hero’s journey as the burgeoning Christian concepts of honor, justice, and order sprout through the chaos of the old pagan ways.
The Green Knight hews closely to the anonymous Pearl Poet’s epic verse: A lumbering beast of a man - an emerald warrior in the literature, a hulking Ent in the film (Ralph Ineson, using the most of his rumbling baritone) - arrives in King Arthur (Sean Harris) and Guinevere’s (Kate Dickie) court to issue a challenge of honor and bravery. Any knight bold enough to strike the visitor may keep his imposing axe, but that man must also accept a return stroke at the Green Chapel “one year hence.” When none of Arthur’s knights step up, the fabled king’s nephew Gawain (Dev Patel) - a squire with no heroic deeds to his name - accepts the challenge to prove his worth. The young upstart lops off the Green Knight’s dome in one fell swoop, even as Arthur reminds him that this is but a game. Surprisingly, the creature picks up his own head and rides out of Camelot with a disembodied cackle, and thus begins Gawain’s year-long journey towards his appointment with destiny.
“The Green Knight…[conveys] a flawed hero’s journey as the burgeoning Christian concepts of honor, justice, and order sprout through the chaos of the old pagan ways.”
In Arthurian legend, Gawain is the most infallible of the Round Table knights - a paragon of honor, bravery, and loyalty. But if you’re looking for your English-lit version of Arthur’s perfect champion, you won’t find him here: David Lowery has crafted a new version of Gawain specifically tailored to Dev Patel’s layered and emotive performance. With barely any exploits under Gawain’s belt, The Green Knight’s truncated title holds double meaning: Of course, it can refer to the titular, axe-wielding challenger, but it can also refer to the story’s inexperienced “green” knight. While the chivalrous and noble warrior of yore slots perfectly into the morality tales of the Pearl Poet, Patel’s wavering and imperfect adventurer - heavy with eagerness, light on fortitude - makes for a far more compelling center to The Green Knight’s hero’s journey. Lowery playfully scrambles legend in a bevy of other clever ways as well - enchantress Morgan Le Fay is recontextualized as Gawain’s pagan magic-wielding mother, drawing up a direct contrast to Arthur and Guinevere’s Christian values, and even Excalibur makes a surprising appearance.
A walking contradiction, Patel’s Gawain is aloof yet gallant, insecure yet confident; every step of his journey - through sly comedy, wondrous awe, or perilous fantasy - serves Lowery’s epic vision. Translating its source material into visual poetry, The Green Knight never once forgets what’s at the core of its impeccably crafted world. If Gawain’s own blossoming bravery and righteousness represent the rise of Christian purity and order, the Green Knight and all the challenges surrounding the narrative represent the primordial forces of paganism that clash with Christianity directly. But The Green Knight isn’t about good versus evil - religion has existed for but a speck of time against the swirling chaos and its pagan followers. Nature - mysterious and unforgiving nature - is older, wiser, and infinitely more powerful than the tenets of Christianity, and Lowery, like the Pearl Poet before him, never lets us forget it. Whether it’s the enigma of local folklore, the allure of hedonism, or the seductiveness of dark pagan magic, the tests of faith are powerful and endless. And that’s only a single reading of The Green Knight; a kaleidoscope of storytelling, the anonymous poet’s 14th Century verses are oft-dissected through varying lenses, and I suspect Lowery’s career-best work here will similarly be an object of cinephile curiosity for years to come.
“The Green Knight is an act of resurrection: Scholarly, demanding, and utterly transportive, it is a cinematic masterstroke in an industry and landscape that frowns upon its kind.”
Like its namesake, The Green Knight is chopped into intertitled set pieces, which might jostle the film’s pacing for some, but its artistry is undeniable. Lowery’s narrative, coupled with frequent director of photography partner Andrew Droz Palermo’s dazzling visuals, draws a fully immersive experience in Ireland’s earthy brown and green textures. A peculiar encounter with a wasteland scavenger (Barry Keoghan) amidst a backdrop of the battle-ravaged dead, a ghastly apparition (Erin Kellyman) searching for her lost head, a mysterious lord (Joel Edgerton) and his seductive lady (Alicia Vikander, pulling double duty) nestled in an ominous castle - every stop along Gawain’s journey is a thematic and aesthetic feast, a perfect interplay of light, shadow, and theatrical production. Malgosia Turzanska’s intricate costume work is also of particular note here, diving deep into granular details that lend seamless authenticity to the film’s lived-in palette.
The Green Knight is an act of resurrection: Scholarly, demanding, and utterly transportive, it is a cinematic masterstroke in an industry and landscape that frowns upon its kind. There are no easy thrills within The Green Knight’s cavernous and threatening walls, but those willing to surrender to its talking animals, to its fevered surrealness, and to its Old World myth-weaving will be thoroughly rewarded with one of the year’s best films.
