The Green Knight
Directed by David Lowery
Running time: 2hrs10 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Dev Patel stars in The Green Knight
There’s a current trend in movie marketing to advertise films as coming from “visionary directors,” some more distinguished than others. It’s a term best avoided no matter how gifted the filmmaker in question: how do you see the words “from the visionary director of…” on screen and not reflexively scoff just a little? Its ubiquitous use, meanwhile, has rather tainted the v-word for any future films that might just merit it. And David Lowery’s grand, mad, entrancing The Green Knight feels like one. It has vision. It is a vision. It lavishes us with image after image to dream about for days afterwards.
That’s all the more thrilling given that The Green Knight arrives in a genre that’s been starved of new imagination and ideas for some time now. Yet another rehash of Arthurian legend? You’d be forgiven for not immediately jumping out of your seat. But Lowery’s interpretation of the 14th-century narrative poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is an extravagant exercise in historical surrealism: it begins with its hero, Dev Patel’s callow warrior Gawain, being woken from slumber, yet every scene that follows feels like one dream, or nightmare, disrupting another. The wraith-like mists and crawling moss that coat the film’s production design may feel stylistically conventional, but beneath them, this world isn’t built as we might expect. Sculptural minimalism defines the medieval stonework, clanking armour takes on the sleek, supple forms of fetishwear, and light keeps piercing the frame from unlikely, unnatural places, sometimes saturating entire scenes in acid baths of verdigris green and radium yellow.
The storytelling is kept simple amid all this untamed world-building, even as Lowery takes key liberties with legend. On Christmas Day, celebrations in King Arthur’s are interrupted by the unannounced, malevolent arrival of the Green Knight — part tree, part man, all unnerving — who issues a curious challenge: any volunteer may strike him with their sword that day, but must meet him the next year at his faraway lair for a rematch. Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, impetuously steps forward, lopping off the intruder’s head with a single slice: the Knight collects it from the floor, replaces it without fuss, and leaves with a grim deal yet to be honoured.
As our lushly coiffed young buck heads off the next December to meet a wholly uncertain fate, however, The Green Knight plays perversely with the conventions of quest story narrative: there’s no noble objective here, just honour to be defended (and a head to be kept) that was never under threat to begin with, but for the intervention of the male ego. It’s equal parts epic hero’s journey and shaggy-dog fable, shot through with hormonal distractions and surprising queer currents. And it’s fitting that Lowery has made it so strangely and ostentatiously beautiful, because beauty is the story’s chief reward: a wicked kind of coming-of-age tale, The Green Knight is about the poetry we absorb en route to gaining perspective. Vision, even.
THE GREEN KNIGHT (2021) Written by David Lowery | Shot by Andrew Droz Palermo | Edited by David Lowery
In cinemas now and on Amazon Prime