On Christmas Day in King Arthur’s court, a knight enters the banquet hall and offers to be struck by one of knights in the room, and in a year and a day's time the knight must find him and he will return the blow.
A hungover Gawain accepts the challenge and cuts off the head of the knight cleanly. The knight however, is not dead. He leaves the room smiling and Gawain has one year till he will receive the same blow. The film tracks his search for the knight and his adventures along the way.
Directed by David Lowery - who has turned into what I hoped Shane Carruth would become, (although he hasn’t quite hit the highs of Carruth’s 2013 masterpiece Upstream Colour ) - this is his most ambitious movie yet, and he certainly made this mediaeval English chivalric poem his own. Filmed in Wexford, it is also a terrific looking film.
Gawain is played by Dev Patel who really has become one of the more interesting actors working today. The supporting cast is packed with familiar faces. Joel Egderton and Alicia Vikander pop up and the exciting young Irish actor Barry Keoghan steals the two scenes he is in - something he has a habit of doing.
I wonder what the studio thought when The Green Knight was delivered to them? It is certainly not a swords and sandals adventure in the vein of Gladiator, nor is it a massive fantasy epic like John Boorman’s Excalibur (also filmed in Ireland ).
One of its strengths is how understated it is, the towns are not packed with peasants and knights like in Game of Thrones, the world is underpopulated with a rather uncomfortable sense of dread. One scene filmed on a field where a huge battle had recently taken place is particularly eerie.
I found the film quite hypnotising, I’m not sure it would have worked as well for me at home with my phone in my pocket and the kettle nearby, but in a cinema, with full immersion, I really got swept away. It is fun to see a fresh, reasonably high budget, high concept, movie released by someone other than Christopher Nolan.
So what Lowery is trying to say with this movie? Is it something about climate change incorporating the Green Man mythology? A meditation on time and dread? The perils of curiosity? The message may have gone over my head but it did not stop me being swept away. Lowery’s next project is a Peter Pan adaptation. I really have no idea what he’s going to do with it, but I cannot wait to see it.
