Last year when Covid was destroying the film industry we saw major releases like F9: The Fast Saga, Black Widow, and No Time to Die play musical chairs with release dates as they moved back to maximize profits through theatrical releases. But that didn’t happen so much with that year’s indie releases like Nomadland and The Sound of Metal, which were low budget enough that they didn’t need millions in box office revenue to make a profit, so rather than waiting for true theatrical releases they found various ways to show up on streaming and went out. There was, however, one indie distributor which (with a few exceptions) opted not to play that game and that was A24. In particular I think their film The Green Knight was emblematic of this: it was set to debut at the 2020 South By Southwest Film Festival leading up to a May 2020 release, but the festival was cancelled, the release was cancelled, and fun and good times were cancelled. But A24 didn’t go running to CBS All Access or whatever with their movie; instead much like the big studios they decided to hold out for a theatrical release for their crazy looking horror inflected Arthurian Legend movie… a decision I support wholeheartedly. Well, the time has finally arrived for David Lowery’s new movie to come out so the big question is “was it worth the wait?”
The film is a cinematic adaptation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a fourteenth century epic poem from an unknown author that exists within the legend of King Arthur and concerns a wager made between an impulsive young knight named Sir Gawain and a supernatural entity called simply The Green Knight. In the poem the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), who here is this strange entity which resembles a walking tree, rides into Arthurs court on Christmas Day and gives an open challenge to those present: fight him in one on one combat and if you can land a blow on him you get to keep his axe but must meet him at his green chapel a year later and take a blow from him. Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) accepts the challenge but once the duel begins The Green Knight drops his weapon and sticks out his neck, which Gawain takes advantage of and lops off the creature’s head. This was a mistake however, as the creature simply picks the head back up and rides off laughing. Gawain is now on the hook to venture out a year later to meet his fate at the chapel and much of the film concerns that journey.
Going into The Green Knight I was not really aware of how much of a direct adaptation of a particular old text it was; indeed the film very closely follows the opening setup of the original text but greatly expands its middle and completely changes its ending but despite those changes it does seem to be very interested in preserving the legend’s medieval peculiarities even as it uses very modern techniques and aesthetic sensibilities to bring them to the screen. The film’s opening wager, for example, makes very little sense. What exactly does this guy have to gain from taking up this duel with the Green Knight? “Winning” this duel seems to do little except place a burden on his head, we have no idea why having this axe for a year will be of any use to him, and the whole thing really obviously seems like a trap. Still he goes ahead with it anyway, seemingly out of some arcane notion of honor, and the film goes along with it fairly unquestioningly and it also shows certain supernatural moments pretty overtly in a way that was almost reminiscent of Darren Arronofsky’s radically literal adaptation of the Noah story. Then when the Gawain goes on his journey the film departs from the original text, which I understand sort of yada yada yadas the actual journey, but I get the impression that the stories along the way which the film does depict are also drawn from legend and folklore to some extent, particularly a stand-out section involving a skull in a spring.
The film was directed by David Lowery, who is certainly an auteur but one who does tend to switch up his choice of subject matter and sort of leaves you guessing as to what to expect from one of his movies. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and The Old Man & the Gun both revealed an aesthetic love of 60s and 70s cinema while A Ghost Story is very minimalist and psychological but all of his films betray a certain interest in legend as a storytelling method and that is perhaps taken to its logical extreme with this movie that almost wants to be a medieval chronicle, but one brought to the screen using the aesthetics of the “A24 horror film” (despite not being a horror film). The Green Knight himself looks like a creature out of a Guillermo del Toro movie and the film’s sets are built in a way where they feel intimate despite being literal castles and the forests are moody in a way that’s almost expressionistic. The film’s title, applied to the modern vernacular, would suggest that the whole thing may have an environmentalist message and there are a couple shots in there that suggest that there may be something of that hidden in there, but the bigger message is probably more of a modern twist on the moral of the original story which is to do with chivalric virtue and masculinity of which this is a lot less forgiving than the original bard who came up with all of this. I’ll leave it at that for now as this is probably not a movie to be decoded on a first viewing, but needless to say I think this movie is a cool and kind of trippy experience that is more than worth a viewing though it certainly won’t be for everyone.
**** out of Five
The Movie Vampire 