Tolkien famously translated “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” himself, and Weta Digital, known for its work on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, handled this movie’s beautifully spare visual effects.) The Green Knight challenges those present to a game, inviting anyone to strike him, on the condition that one year later they will reunite at the distant Green Chapel, where the challenger will be dealt the same blow in return.
(The Middle-earth echoes are fitting: J.R.R. Riding in on horseback and bearing aloft a leafy scepter, he’s an imposing Treebeard-like figure, but his eyes, gleaming out from a gnarled trunk of a face, carry more mischief than malice. We see her cunning hand at work as Arthur’s Christmas festivities are interrupted by the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), who turns up like the evil fairy crashing Sleeping Beauty’s christening.Įvil, however, is not the name of this visitor’s game. But in one of a few key deviations from the original text, Gawain is also the son of the enchantress Morgan le Fay (Sarita Choudhury), whose determination to secure his future sets the story in motion. He is the nephew of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickey) and a privileged guest at their Christmas celebration. Gawain, whom Patel inhabits even more assuredly than he did David Copperfield, himself incarnates that religio-cultural tension. “Christ is born,” she says, and the invocation lingers like so many Arthurian legends, “The Green Knight” bears witness as an old world of pagan rites gives way to a rising tide of Christian belief. The one rousing him this time is his lover, Essel (Alicia Vikander), in a brothel on Christmas morning.
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(Andrew Droz Palermo composed the film’s exquisite images the intricate but never ostentatious sets and costumes were designed by Jade Healy and Malgosia Turzanska, respectively.) Tellingly, when we first meet Gawain, he’s being yanked out of a deep slumber, not for the last time in a movie that plays like a series of rude awakenings.
The importance of seeing clearly, of peering into oneself and the larger world with depth and discernment, is at the heart of a story marked by its own peculiar intensity of vision. It’s a bewitching feat of revisionist mythmaking, the kind that implores you to look upon an old story with newly appreciative eyes. So will those who’ve seen their share of Arthurian screen epics, a mixed lineage that ranges from the lush Wagnerian grandeur of John Boorman’s “Excalibur” to the bold demystifications of Robert Bresson’s “Lancelot du Lac.” “The Green Knight” isn’t a radical departure from these forebears by turns ravishing and austere, scholarly and accessible, earthy and exalted, it seems to have absorbed its many influences and alchemized them into something vital and singular. Those who’ve read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th century poem of unknown authorship and vast influence, will come to Lowery’s film with their own preconceptions. One way to approach this extraordinarily beautiful and hypnotic movie is to see it as another kind of game, one that Lowery is delighted to play with you and your expectations. If this is indeed a game, the stakes are uncertain, the rules a mystery, the outcome far from assured. They are spoken by King Arthur (Sean Harris) to his impetuous young nephew, Gawain (Dev Patel), who’s about to confront the challenge of his life.
“Remember: It is only a game.” Those words, more ominous than reassuring, are heard early in “The Green Knight,” David Lowery’s misty, melancholy dream of a medieval epic.
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