Odyssey is a medieval oddity
THE BIG RELEASE
THE GREEN KNIGHT 15
★★★★✩
ACCORDING to its trailer, this swords ’n’ sorcery epic is ablaze with brave knights yelling ‘rarrrrrh!!’, fighting fantasy and horses going gallopy-gallopy, plus a cute talking comedy fox – which is exactly why you should never trust a trailer. For The Green
Knight is a weird, opaque, slow-burn Arthurian fever dream that’s likely to delight (some) critics but not kids.
It’s a misty Christmas time at the Round Table. King Arthur (Sean Harris) asks his playboy nephew, Gawain (Dev Patel), to regale him with a Yuletide story. Gawain is stumped. Suddenly a giant stranger (Ralph Ineson) enters with a very large axe. He looks like a non-jolly green version of Groot from Guardians Of The Galaxy, and he challenges the knights to a deadly game. Desperate to earn his spurs, Gawain accepts and beheads the Green Knight, only to find himself duty-bound to get his own head lopped off next Christmas. Not the gift he was looking for…
There’s already Oscars buzz around Dev Patel. The gangly kid from Slumdog Millionaire now radiates assured nobility on screen. As Gawain quests his way through a series of enigmatic supernatural encounters, he also meets a high-cred support cast, including Barry Keoghan, Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander as a cheeky wench in a pixie cut and an iffy oop-North accent. ‘Why greatness?’ she chirps, challenging Gawain about his life goals. ‘Is not goodness enough?’
Director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon) is an odd-fish auteur who takes his own sweet time when it comes to pacing. You may recall his unbearably pretentious ‘slow horror’ A Ghost Story, where the film halts to watch Rooney Mara eat a chocolate pie, in real time, for five minutes. And deliberately little is spelt out, thematically, in The Green Knight, which is bound to drive some people crackers. Come the abrupt, headscratcher ending, I’m betting half the cinema will have long since packed up their popcorn and left.
Yet those who fall under The Green Knight’s spell will discover a mesmerisingly beautiful, surprisingly playful reinvention of a 14th-century poem that will one day quite possibly be hailed as a classic. Meantime, it’s frankly a miracle this oddity got made – and maybe that’s why Lowery’s doing Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy as his next paid gig.
Out Friday in cinemas and on Prime Video