Aces of Weird: 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.
Dev Patel as Gawain, A24
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.
