The enchantress puppet master of the original is now also Gawain’s mother, mesmerisingly played by Sarita Choudhury, setting otherworldly Oedipal wheels in motion.ĭuring the chaptered settings of Gawain’s journey, A Meeting with St Winifred finds our antihero arriving at a Hansel and Gretel-like cottage where he is pointedly charged with retrieving the saint’s severed head, thereby intertwining two legends. Gone is any clear revelation of the Green Knight’s identity, replaced with subtle visions suggesting that his “true” personality is legion. En route, his mettle will be tested by thieves and temptresses alike.ĭespite cleaving more closely to the original text than previous screen incarnations (we’re a million miles away from the cod antics of 1984’s Sword of the Valiant), Lowery’s sumptuously elusive film nevertheless makes several innovative leaps, emphasising duality and ambiguity. A year later, he must journey to the Green Knight’s woodland chapel and receive a similar wound in return. The still-to-be knighted Gawain insists he has no tale to tell, to which the Queen (played with chilly magnetism by Kate Dickie) simply adds: “Yet.” When the giant titular knight appears, looking like a verdant cousin of Peter Jackson’s Treebeard, and makes his blow-for-blow challenge (“it is only a game”), Gawain takes his mighty axe and chops off his head, sealing his fate. It’s Christmas Day at the Round Table, as the king (a sympathetic Sean Harris) invites his wastrel nephew Gawain (Patel) to sit by his side. Capitalising on leading man Dev Patel’s uncanny ability to embody a combination of weakness and strength, wretchedness and valour, Lowery’s haunting epic takes the viewer on a mythical quest, replete with flaming heads and eerie giants, that condenses the emotional weight of Peter Jackson’s entire Lord of the Rings trilogy into just over two hours of dense screen magic. An ambitious adaptation of the chivalric poem about the adventures of an Arthurian knight, written in Middle English by an unknown author (and most famously translated in the 21st century by Simon Armitage), The Green Knight is the best work yet from David Lowery, director of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story. W hat a strange and peculiarly powerful film this is.
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