An Arthurian adventure that pricks the psyche
Robbie Collin reviews the new medieval epic starring Dev Patel, and Susannah Goldsbrough tells the story of the myth that inspired it
Film The Green Knight 15 cert, 130 min
★★★★★
Dir: David Lowery
Starring: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Ralph Ineson, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie,
Joel Edgerton, Barry Keoghan
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is sometimes waggishly described as Ingmar Bergman with more laughs. By the same token, The Green Knight is a bit like Monty Python and the Holy Grail without them. The new film from David Lowery is a swaggeringly strange adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which expands and reworks the 14th-century Arthurian poem into a string of supremely eerie mythic skits. Dev Patel stars as Gawain himself, who spends much of the film in Brave Sir Robin mode, trotting gingerly through verdant glades, and eyeing every bank of billowing, smoke-machine fog with mortal dread.
Not that you can blame him. One Christmas Day at Camelot, an uninvited guest comes clumping into the great hall, clutching a holly bough and an enormous axe that causes the flagstones beneath it to fur over with moss.
This hulking, barkencrusted visitor, played by Ralph Ineson and apparently summoned by Gawain’s enchantress mother
(Sarita
Choudhury), challenges the courtiers to a “friendly Christmas game”.
The rules are a cinch: a volunteer gets to take one free hit on his person, to be reciprocated one year later at the Green Chapel, six days’ journey north. Gawain, eager to impress his sicklylooking king (Sean Harris), takes up the axe and lops off the visitor’s head – which then gruffly reiterates the Ts and Cs, before its body retrieves it from the floor and clumps off.
As the seasons turn, Gawain becomes something of a folk hero. But as winter arrives, the time comes for him to leave his peasant lover (Alicia Vikander) and provide an ending to his legend: in other words, to honourably ride northwards and get what’s coming to him. All together now: he was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways. Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Gawain!
Such a tale suits Lowery to his bones. The director of A Ghost Story, The Old Man and the Gun and the recent live-action remake of Pete’s Dragon is a questing sort of filmmaker, given to pursuing his fascinations off the edges of the known genre map. As in the poem, Gawain’s journey eventually brings him to a castle where he’s taken in by a garrulous lord (Joel Edgerton) and his beguiling lady (Vikander again, in a clever mirrorrole), who together strike with him a riddling bargain of their own.
But Lowery laces the journey with further, fable-like encounters with a silver-tongued scavenger (Barry Keoghan), the Welsh martyr Saint Winifred (Erin Kellyman), a herd of blank-eyed giants who look like cousins of the towering Traags of René Laloux’s Fantastic
Planet, and even a talking fox, who it’s nice to see is still getting work 12 years on from Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.
Each vignette has the subcutaneous prickle of folklore – unapologetically weird as they are, you can feel their hooks snagging on your psyche’s most deeply buried regions. The trouble is, the shallower parts – the ones that just want to be honestly amazed, aroused and amused – start to feel a little left out. Mythopoeia is the name of the game here, and unlike A Ghost Story, there’s nothing to undercut the metaphysical heft – no equivalent of Casey Affleck standing around with a white sheet over his head.
Patel is on fine form, though. He looks like a matinee idol dragged through a hedge – in a good way – and his character is intentionally left as something of a blank slate. (He’s the hero-in-waiting who only belatedly realises that while legends can live forever, their participants generally don’t.)
When an encounter with bandits leaves Patel’s Gawain lying helplessly bound and gagged at the foot of a tree, Lowery contrives a striking memento mori, panning the camera left until the shot circles back around on itself, revealing a skeleton lying in the same position goodness-knows-how-many years hence. Time then turns backwards, and the tale resumes – yet time is clearly all that stands between the earthly powers Gawain represents and their certain demise.
“When you go, your footprints will fill with grass,” Vikander cautions in a beautifully written monologue. “Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues.” Meanwhile at the chapel, the tree-man waits, axe in hand. Courtly romance? Pah. In the long run, arbor vincit omnia. It’s leaf, not love, that conquers all. RC