Review: The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)
This hallucinatory yuletide fantasy baffled audiences on release, yet remains one of the greatest films in Arthurian cinema. And, yes, it’s a Christmas movie. Fight me.
Bearing the seal of bleeding-edge studio A24, The Green Knight was trailered in 2021 as a dank, horror-tinged adaptation of a bygone fantasy text. Heads caught fire like they did in the studio’s 2018 shocker Hereditary. Gujarati-heritage heartthrob Dev Patel was daringly cast as King Arthur’s nephew Gawain, while the head-lopping Green Knight was recast as some sort of murderous Treebeard.
But fantasy fans recovering from the double-disaster of Covid and Season Eight of Game of Thrones, found this solemn, woozy, puzzle-picture a little too much. To be fair, I took in a double-bill of Joker and The Lighthouse the day before lockdown and it made me want to hide in a cupboard.
Those hoping for a hearty Arthurian romp may have been better served by previous adaptations like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1973) or Sword of the Valiant (1984)1.
Director David Lowery instead takes a deep breath and plunges inward, deep into chivalric pathology and beyond, into the wild and ferny wellsprings of fantasy itself. Like John Boorman’s still-wonderous Excalibur (1981) and Lowery’s own previous film A Ghost Story (2017), The Green Knight finds oceans of meaning in a premise of fairy-tale simplicity.
Like Robert Zemeckis’s dead-eyed CGI-fest Beowulf (20072), The Green Knight returns to a foundational fantasy tale, namely Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian poem written in tiddly-om-pom-pom Middle English some 600 years before the dawn of Brandon Sanderson3.
All that’s known about the original author is that he was most likely from the Midlands (non-UK readers, think Winterfell and Sean Bean). The poem has been famously translated by Tolkien – his version published posthumously in 1975 – and West Yorkshire-born poet Simon Armitage in 2007. Sadly, it’s become a dreaded set text in British schools and over-analysed by generations of scholars (not least of all by Tolkien himself) to the point where your eyes glaze over and you achieve a sort of nirvana of tedium.
The Green Knight, then, sets about a comprehensive re-weirding of this dry narrative soil, strange new saplings taking root in the cracks, releasing a heady perfume that melts reality and fantasy into a beguiling blur. The movie’s quest is ponderous at times, perhaps overly cryptic, and it’s probably best if you already know your Sir Bediveres from your Bertilaks. But stick with it. The Green Knight all adds up to a masterpiece of Arthurian cinema.
We first meet Gawain (not yet a ‘sir’) in the straw and squalor of a medieval bawdy house, a boyish layabout, happily drunk in the arms of his low-born lover Essel (Alicia Vikander). Far from the flower of knighthood, Dev Patel’s Gawain is more of a weed, the scrawny, estranged ‘nephew’ of King Arthur (Sean Harris), not to mention the son of a witch, Morgan Le Fey (Sarita Choudhury)4.
But it’s Christmas and the aging Arthur’s pallor has become as wintery as the land over which he rules alongside his equally cadaverous consort Guinevere (the wonderful Kate Dickie bringing the same avian menace she brought to Lysa Arryn in Game of Thrones). Bidding Gawain sit beside him at the Round Table during the Christmas revels, Arthur confesses regret at being so distant from his… er… ‘nephew’ for so many years and wishes to know more about him. But Gawain searches his soul and confesses he has nothing to tell.
“Yet,” says Guinevere with a maybe-vengeful smile.
There’s a folk-horror feel of dreadful ceremony about these early scenes, with lots of secretive, ritualistic imagery (pentagrams, tarot-tiles, towering tabernacles) set to a creepy choral score by Daniel Hart with stark costumes that reduce the characters to pieces in some sinister game of chess. (The vivid costume designs by Malgosia Turzanska recall the dark pageantry of Fritz Lang’s two-part mythological masterpiece, Die Nibelungen [1924], the first classic of epic fantasy cinema filmed in Weimar Germany decades before The Lord of the Rings was even written). Morgana pulls teeth and burns totems like she’s offering up her son for sacrifice to the Green Man, the May King, Jack-in-the-Green (Ralph Ineson) who duly gatecrashes Arthur’s Christmas party, on horseback no less. And I’m pretty sure neither bothered to wipe their feet.
With a face like an uprooted tree and a voice like the Yorkshire Moors, the Green Knight extends the holly branch of peace and proposes a merry Christmas game. He’ll allow any man here to chop off his head, if that man would return to the Green Knight’s bower one year hence so that he might return the favour. As Christmas games go, it’s preferable to Monopoly.
Eager to prove his worth before the men of the Round Table, Gawain sends that booming stump bouncing across the flagstones, then watches in horror as the headless giant plods over to retrieve it.
“One. Year. Hence.”
The seasons pass and Gawain gets his Christmas wish. Lays are being sung, portraits painted. Gawain has become a folk hero, though death be the cost of such lasting fame. Gawain must obey the code of courtesy if he is to become truly a man of honour. Like any right-minded Englishman, he would rather have his head chopped off than be impolite.
In interviews, director David Lowery has professed his love of 80s fantasy cinema, notably Dragonslayer (Matthew Robbins, 1981), Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985) and – his favourite – Willow5 (Ron Howard, 1988). And his fascination with those quest narratives certainly shows as he expands Gawain’s travelogue – montaged in the poem within a mere two pages – into the first half of the movie.
Gawain’s journey was filmed in the pissing rain on the blustery moors of Ireland’s County Tipperary6, where the forests look like pagan monasteries, pillars of pine reaching into infinity. The world of The Green Knight feels romantic, tactile and threatening.
Waylaid by bandits (led by a horribly puckish Barry Keoghan), Gawain is robbed, bound and left for dead on the forest floor. From here, the camera does a slow 360, winding forward like a clock, passing the chirp of Spring birds, the whistle of Winter winds, before halting at the mouldering bones of our hero. It then winds back to the present where Gawain finds the strength to struggle free. It’s like reaching one of those ‘Your Adventure Ends Here’ paragraphs in a Fighting Fantasy gamebook before you thumb your way back in time and find a different route.
It’s also one of several times in which The Green Knight ricochets through time like the plot of some transcendental Tarantino movie, following paths untaken, revealing the man Gawain may have become. It’s like tracing the roots of some great tree of Story.
The source poem makes a fleeting mention of Holy Head (today a port town on the Isle of Anglesey, Wales), which Lowery expands into an eerie side-quest on behalf of fellow beheadee St Winifred. “Are you real or are you a spirit?” asks Gawain. “What is the difference?” she says.
Gawain journeys on, starving, shivering, ignored by a troupe of bald female giants as the camera winds again, turning reality itself on its head.
The ominous symbolism of it all would become intolerable if it weren’t such a deeply rooted expression of Gawain’s inner journey, his vulnerability, his hunger for self-worth, his desire to do better, to achieve greatness, his terror of change.
With his narrow, glowering features, Dev Patel’s vulpine good looks (his spirit guide is a fox) gives his Gawain a tense, furtive energy. He doesn’t kung fu his way out of confrontations but tends to shrivel in fright. The actor’s Indian heritage, like the emerald hue of the Green Knight, emphasises his otherness in this otherwise bone-white world. Note the movie’s title drops the ‘Sir Gawain and’ bit. Our boyish hero (Gawain the greenhorn) and his manly executioner are one and the same.
Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, Gawain eventually reaches the castle of Sir Bertilak (jovial Joel Edgerton) and his Lady, where lines blur even further and things get decidedly gooey. As per the poem, Gawain’s host proposes to give him the choicest cuts from his daily hunt in return for whatever Gawain might receive in his castle that day, leaving Gawain to protect his virtue (not entirely successfully) from the advances of lord and lady alike.
Alicia Vikander plays the dual roles of both Gawain’s peasant lover Essel and the Lady Bertilak, much like Margaret Hamilton played twin harridans Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Just as Judy Garland’s Dorothy must confront the Wicked Witch to learn how to stand up to Miss Gulch back in Kansas, Gawain must make his peace with both Essel and Lady Bertilak to solve the riddle not of steel but of Woman.
Lady Bertilak takes his portrait (in a method that looks suspiciously like an old-timey camera), capturing a man frozen in boyhood, just as Essel warns Gawain of his prideful quest (“this is how silly men die,”), just as those lady giants dwarfed Gawain in passing, like adults looming over a little boy.
And this isn’t some modish jab about toxic masculinity; it’s as mythic as they come, a tale as old as time – the need for rites of passage, for the child to become an adult.
The Green Knight is one heady draught of elf-mead, its fantasy several multiverses away from the shallow stuff of snarky, self-aware adventurers, fusspot magic systems and greenscreen mega-battles. Wisconsin-born and Texas-raised, Lowery has an astonishing feel for the misty melancholy of the English imagination. As a translation of the poem, his movie draws you into a medieval mindset, to a time when all was faith and mystery.
“[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the original poem] belongs to that literary kind which has deep roots in the past, deeper even than its author was aware. It is made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times, beyond the vision or awareness of the poet… Antiquity like a many-figured back-cloth hangs ever behind the scene. Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it receives part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1953. Collected in The Monsters & The Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 1983
Lowery’s only real departure from the source text is also his most audacious, when Gawain finally reaches the Green Knight’s fateful grove and the movie sprouts another unexpected tendril through time.
Is it really possible to spoil the ending? Where have you been for the last 500 years? Suffice to say, the poem ends with the Green Knight relieving Gawain not of his head, but his ego.
Next to Disney’s equally kaleidoscopic magic-realist fantasia Encanto, The Green Knight was one the best fantasy films of 2021. But is it a Christmas fantasy for the ages, a movie to rival perennial favourites like It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984), or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005)?
Well, of course it is.
How well it captures the strained courtly gathering of Christmas Day, that liminal week-long journey between Christmas and New Year, the hope of shedding who we once were and setting forth renewed. It makes perfect sense that Lowery directed Ralph Inseson to play the Green Knight like Santa Claus, albeit bearing a headsman’s axe in lieu of a sack of presents. And how many would feel grateful for such a gift after a long day spent with relatives?
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Both directed and co-written by Stephen Weeks. Sir Gawain was the last movie of the great and troubled Nigel Green (Hercules from Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts). Weeks envisioned it as a “medieval Easy Rider”, but the film was disastrously recut by United Artists. Weeks took another swing at the material ten years later with Sword of the Valiant, this time starring Ator: The Fighting Eagle’s Miles O’Keeffe as Gawain in a luscious blonde wig and Sean Connery done up like a Christmas tree. Stephen Weeks interview by Troy Howarth (2014) for The Peter Cushing Appreciation Society.
A suitably monstrous vocal performance from Ray Winstone and a terrific, erudite script by Neil Gaiman and Pulp Fiction’s Roger Avary, both wasted on a now-forgotten 3D gimmick-movie.
Elements of the story had previously appeared in Irish and Germanic romances (the tales of Cuchulainn are particularly fond of head-chopping contests), as well as the works of influential French poet Chrétien de Troyes, who penned several Arthurian bestsellers in the 1170s, back when the Crusades were still a thing. Historians agree Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written around 1400, the only surviving manuscript having been discovered in the early 17th century, only to be completely forgotten for a couple of hundred years and rediscovered in a drawer somewhere in 1824.
If you know your Arthuriana, you’ll detect in this Gawain a touch of the devilish Mordred, the bastard offspring of Arthur and his half-sister Morgana.
The gibbeted skeleton Gawain passes at a crossroads is a grim reference to Val Kilmer’s character Madmartigan.
The filmmakers made extensive use of Tipperary’s Cahir Castle, the site of a major battle scene in Boorman’s Excalibur.
Such a weird and fascinating movie. I first saw it on a plane, which was a weird enough situation as it was...
THIS. Was good. Yes I will watch it again.
Thanks for making the time to write it. And thanks to everyone who made this film.