The first image in The Green Knight is a crown, or halo, hovering in the air. Drawn by some inexorable force, it descends through murky darkness to settle on the head of a young man, Gawain (Dev Patel). There is a sense of destiny here, of a fateful joining, but it feels less like a triumph and more like something frightening and inescapable. Does the wearer want his crown? Did he choose this fate, or did it choose him? Then the crown ignites, and Gawain’s head is engulfed in flame.
The Green Knight, a new film adaptation of the 14th-century Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is not Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. The film is intense, disorienting, cryptic, frustrating, and unsettling. In the hands of writer and director David Lowery, the chivalric legend feels less like an epic fantasy and more like an existential horror movie.
Lowery is interested in the supernatural and the existential: One of his previous films, A Ghost Story (2017), was a drama about a dead man (Casey Affleck, in a bedsheet) haunting the house where his wife still lives, trapped outside of time as the world moves on. As with that film, The Green Knight’s distributor is A24, the indie film production company founded in 2012 that has become synonymous with unconventional, slightly edgy movies that still have commercial appeal: Ex Machina, Moonlight, Uncut Gems, Ladybird, among many others. Although A24 has released all kinds of films, including the first to be based on a viral Twitter thread (Zola), a Yiddish-language production (Menashe), and a black-and-white movie about two men trapped together in a phallic symbol (The Lighthouse), the company has become particularly known for a certain kind of horror movie, including Midsommar, The Witch, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, and Hereditary, that is psychological, maybe a bit cerebral, but still terrifying. The Green Knight seems of a piece with these, in sensibility if not in genre.
Gawain (pronounced Gar-wyn) lives in Camelot, where he is a nephew of King Arthur, but he’s decidedly not a knight. He’s a hedonist and a bit of “failson,” in the words of some critics: the medieval equivalent of the well-intentioned, well-liked 20-something who can never seem to finish community college and move out of the basement. Despite his relation to the king, Gawain is obscure and prefers it that way. As the film opens, he’s spent the night sleeping at a brothel with his lover, Essel (Alicia Vikander), a commoner and perhaps a prostitute. He trudges home, nursing a hangover, and tells his mother, the sorceress Morgan le Fay (Sarita Choudhury), unconvincingly, that he’s been at Mass. It’s Christmas, and Gawain has to show his face at his uncle’s annual celebration. At the king’s court, Gawain slips into his usual, unobtrusive spot, but King Arthur (Sean Harris) and his queen, Guinevere (Kate Dickie), spy him and beckon him over. The aging king tells Gawain that he regrets not having taken more of an interest in his life. He asks Gawain to tell him and the queen some story of himself, and Gawain, ashamed, realizes he has none to tell.
Elsewhere, Morgan le Fay and some of her witch friends perform a magic ritual that may have something to do with what happens next: A mysterious and terrifying warrior, half-man, half-tree, astride a horse and wielding a tremendous ax, bursts into the king’s court. This Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) asks if anyone present is brave enough to try to land a blow on him. If the person succeeds, he or she will win his ax and, presumably, much glory. But the person must also agree to travel a year later to the Green Knight’s abode, the Green Chapel, and receive the same wound. Perhaps emboldened by his conversation with the king, Gawain, uncharacteristically, volunteers. He steps forward expecting a fierce duel. Instead, his foe falls to a knee and offers up his neck, defenseless. Gawain hesitates, then beheads him. The Green Knight rises and picks up his disembodied head. He reminds Gawain of their wager and rides off laughing.
Gawain spends the next year as the toast of the town. He drinks and gets in bar fights, but his agreement with the Green Knight hangs heavily over him. Christmas comes ever closer. Essel begs him not to go through with the bargain, but he feels he must. He sets out for the Green Chapel. Along his journey, he is tricked by a bandit (Barry Keoghan), meets a ghost princess (Erin Kellyman), acquires a fox companion, eats some dodgy mushrooms, sees giants roam, and wakes one day in a creepy, mostly empty castle whose lord (Joel Edgerton) and lady (Alicia Vikander, like Essel) both seem to take an unsettling sexual interest in him. Eventually, he makes his way to the Green Chapel to face his fate.
An existential dread hangs over the whole film. I’m not an expert in chivalric poetry, so I won’t try to give a precise accounting of how closely the film hews to its source material, but I will say that the poem has a happy and unambiguous ending — the film does not. The Green Knight is more interested in probing the poem’s metaphysical questions of fate, honor, and chance than in making them accessible. Lowery’s vision calls to mind The Witch, Robert Eggers’s excellent 2015 horror film set in 17th-century New England, which, rather than condescend to its Puritan characters’ beliefs or frame them as subjective, took them as literal and axiomatic. The Green Knight leans into its supernatural elements, though its mystical and even slightly playful moments struggle against the film’s often cold and alienating tone.
I’ve heard The Green Knight described as a “modern retelling,” but that is misleading. Except for the film’s multiracial casting, it is not modern in the sense of, say, Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine’s mischievous 1995 adaptation of Richard III, which transplanted Shakespearean language onto an alternate-history 1930s London of tanks and fascists. The Green Knight is perhaps “modern” in its dark tone and its tendency to view grittiness as a proxy for authenticity. This is a film that is visually stunning but rarely pretty: Camelot is a maze of dark and dirty corridors filled with people with bad teeth, and the outside wilderness, stark and ominous, is even less inviting.
The Green Knight is an aesthetic achievement: assured, uncompromising, and admirably committed to its own weirdness. In a production with many fine actors, Patel, in particular, shines as the uncertain and all-too-human Gawain, determined to live honorably despite, or because of, his flawed mortality. It is more debatable whether the film is broadly enjoyable, or even good. The Green Knight’s coyness and density are a reminder that a film can be intense without necessarily being engaging: In the cinema where I watched it, two people fell asleep in the first 30 minutes. When the credits began to roll, people in the audience (those who had stayed awake) looked awed but slightly puzzled. They had come for swords and sorcery but had been walloped with existential riddles.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
