“The Green Knight,” Reviewed: David Lowery’s Boldly Modern Revision of a Medieval Legend (2024)

David Lowery’s new film, “The Green Knight,” is an adaptation of the Arthurian poem of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” but it’s no more about medieval life and chivalrous norms than Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is about stocks and bonds. Instead, Lowery, who both wrote and directed the movie, follows in the path of one of his previous works, “A Ghost Story”—which he created outside the studios, with a personal sense of urgency—to make a rueful and mighty work of apocalyptic cinema. Just as Scorsese spotlights, in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” money hunger as society’s original sin—which affects his viewers and the world at large no less than it does his antihero—Lowery portrays the bold challenge facing Gawain (played by Dev Patel), in his confrontation with the titular monster (Ralph Ineson), as a folly and a delusion far more comprehensive than the codes of knighthood. Lowery’s underlying subject is martial valor, the test of violence that stands as a misguided model of manhood and which corrupts and ravages current-day society at its very core.

Gawain, a callow young nobleman, is introduced in the movie’s first shot, one that, true to Lowery’s tone throughout, is as contemplative as it is spectacular. It is an extended-take long shot that moves gradually back from an animal-filled courtyard, through a window, to land on a visage of the sleeping hero. He’s awakened, with a comedic rudeness, by a splash of water in the face, delivered by his lover, Essel (Alicia Vikander), a prostitute in a teeming bawdy house with whom he has just spent Christmas Eve. He goes home, where his mother (Sarita Chowdhury) teases him about his night out—but there’s already trouble afoot in the kingdom, because Gawain’s night of love with the joyful, compassionate, and wise Essel is indeed a sacrament, one that his society, no less than our own, would recognize as such.

Taking his place at a Christmas feast hosted by his uncle, King Arthur (Sean Harris), Gawain is called upon by the ruler to tell a tale of himself—and finds that he has no tale to tell, which is to say he has no tale that he deems worthy of telling a table of battle-tested warriors. But Gawain’s tale is being written—by his mother, who applies witchcraft to set Gawain on his ostensibly heroic path. Her mystical ways conjure a monster, a green-clad, seemingly tree-like giant who turns up at the feast with a challenge: that someone deal this Green Knight a sword blow and take possession of his mighty axe, on the condition that this person, the following Christmas, show up at the Green Knight’s Green Chapel to accept a blow from him. The risk is obvious and none of the knights at Arthur’s table dare accept. But Gawain breaks the ostensibly cowardly silence, takes up the challenge, and decapitates the Green Knight in a single blow. The monster isn’t killed, however; he rises and lifts his severed head, which speaks and laughs and leaves, to await Gawain in a year.

Gawain, a noble nobody, becomes an instant celebrity: the tale of his bloody blow to the Green Knight is bruited about far and wide in the kingdom. Children watch a puppet show in which he’s the hero. He sits for a portrait. Drinkers in a tavern recognize him and deem themselves honored by his presence, and Gawain in turn lives like a swell-headed young celebrity, carousing with them every night and stumbling home splattered in mud and contented with his bloody deed. Yet, when he’s prepared to live on his legend and welch on his end of the bargain, his mother forces him onto the road to seek the Green Knight: “Is it wrong to want greatness for you?” (She’s a maternal martial instigator akin to Volumnia in Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”) (Before he leaves, he spends another night with Essel, who tries to persuade him not to leave. He declares that his “honor” depends on it, but she scoffs. “This is how silly men perish,” she says, adding, “Why is goodness not enough?” Yet Gawain sets forth on his dubious journey, riding off on horseback and followed by children who call his name and cheer him on. This scene is intercut, movingly, with Essel’s proposal of marriage to Gawain (done with wit—she moves his jaw with her hand and impersonates him proposing to her), which he spurns in view of his adventure.

Avoiding spoilers, suffice it to say that Lowery shares Essel’s point of view regarding not only Gawain’s adventure but the entire system of values on which it’s based—a system that insures Essel’s exclusion from the high society that lionizes Gawain and is preparing him for power. An air of grim foreboding launches Gawain’s journey to the Green Chapel, when he soon happens upon a battlefield strewn with unburied corpses. There, Gawain encounters a young man—a boy, really (played, with a Shakespearean flourish, by Barry Keoghan)—who says proudly that his two brothers lie dead there, and bitterly complains that his mother wouldn’t let him go to battle alongside them. Though the cards seem stacked against Gawain, Lowery, by means of his fundamental and inspired cinematic artistry, nonetheless conveys the glory and the wonder that illuminate and exalt the journey. The encounter on the blood-soaked plain is realized in a single long, thrilling, and starkly graphic tracking shot that evokes the extraordinary and the mysterious even amid the unrelenting horror of death in war.

Lowery fills “The Green Knight” with such astounding visions: a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan shot that conjures Gawain’s dire foreboding; a majestic crane shot over a hilltop that reveals the presence of diaphanous colossi; a galaxy that appears in the depths of water; a talking fox. These moments of visual poetry, using images in the place of lyrical language, evoke a realm of magic and of living fantasy that make the world of Gawain alluring, enticing, bewitching, seductive, inspiring. Yet that world comes off as no mere fantasy but as a synecdoche of the world of our own, here and now. The wonders and mysteries, the dramatic encounters and narrow escapes, the suspenseful journey and the dazzling images all add up to the kind of tale that Gawain, at the story’s outset, didn’t have, the only kind of tale that he deems worth telling—and the kind of tale that current-day readers and viewers, as consumers of stories, deem worth reading or watching.

As in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the seductiveness of the misguided venture is central to the idea of “The Green Knight.” Lowery’s subject isn’t what’s wrong with the quest to become a knight—it’s the very world in which “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” has been handed down, from generation to generation, as an exemplary work of literature of heroes tested in battle, consecrated in blood, and celebrated for killing. In Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” the ghost isn’t just an apparition but a silent and ubiquitous eye that gives the audience a privileged view of the horrors of history and their perpetuation in the present day. In “The Green Knight,” Lowery revises a legend, in style and in substance, in order to evoke a way of telling different stories, and of telling stories differently. He takes the risk of perpetuating a deluded gospel of evil, or of seeming to do so, in a daring effort to dramatize a world in desperate need of artistic redemption.