Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Green Knight’ on VOD, a Lusciously Layered Visual and Allegorical Masterpiece

The Green Knight bows on VOD on a wave of wholly justified acclaim. It adapts the 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table participates in “the beheading game” with a mysterious knight, perhaps to prove his manhood, to the other knights or the king or his girlfriend or his mother or himself, take your pick. If that doesn’t sound enticing enough, the film stars a never-so-inspired Dev Patel, and it’s a visual marvel from director David Lowery (A Ghost Story, 2016’s Pete’s Dragon remake), who we kind of knew had this in him, didn’t we? So I think the question here is whether The Green Knight is a masterpiece, or just merely great.

THE GREEN KNIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Gawain (Patel) awakens on Christmas morning as we all do, in a brothel, splashed in the face with a bucket of water by your girlfriend, who exclaims, “Christ is born!” He returns to Camelot smelling of what you probably think he smells of — frankincense no doubt. He tells his mother, Morgana le Fay (Serita Choudhury) he was at Mass. “You? At Mass? All night?” she asks, and to be honest, he’s not entirely lying. Christmas dinner at the Round Table is quite the affair, and this time, King Arthur (Sean Harris) unexpectedly invites his generally pointless nephew Gawain to sit by his side. Notably, Morgana skips the feast to perform some ritual witchcraft with some fellow practitioners of the dark arts. One senses Arthur is trying to inspire Gawain out of his meandering ways, but the king is so gaunt and sickly and rotting he can barely lift his own sword these days, and his queen, Guinevere (Kate Dickie) looks so very skullfaced. Are influence and power eating them alive? Or is it all the heavily boiled food?

But dinner soon takes a serious turn when a tree-man gallops through the door, creaking like a rustling forest with every bat of the lash and proclamation of challenge to whosoever is brave enough to take him on. Apparently there is no choice: Someone must deliver a blow to this Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) and quest to find him a year later to receive the same blow in return. Makes sense. The Knights of the Round Table glance their mustaches and bangs about at each other and abstain from taking the bait, like wise or cowardly men, one can’t be sure. Gawain steps up. Arthur hands him his sword. The Green Knight bows his neck. His head tumbles to the stone. But the Green Knight’s body stands up, retrieves his noggin and says see ya next year and laughs.

Title card: “…a Too Quick Year.” Pretty sure Gawain has been drunk the entire time. Tales of his bravery-slash-stupidity have traveled far and wide, even making it to the puppet shows, where Gawain and the Green Knight decapitate each other, except I don’t think Gawain can pull off the same trick as his opponent. It’s about time to man up. Gawain’s lover Essel (Alicia Vikander) is the voice of reason: “This is how silly men perish.” “While brave men become great,” he retorts. “Why greatness?” she asks. “Is goodness not enough?” She wants to be “his lady” when he returns, but he doesn’t reply. He doesn’t think he’s going to return. He’s handed sword and shield and a skinny green girdle in which his mother has sewn an enchantment that will protect him, and off he clops on horseback, surely very much afraid to be mashed to a pulp, to have his eyes gouged out, brave brave brave brave Sir Gawain.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Green Knight is very much its own thing, but there are moments when one wonders if it isn’t Wes Anderson’s Camelot meets Guillermo del Toro’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Performance Worth Watching: In a movie with long, long dialogue-free stretches, Patel is asked to carry the weight of the film’s grandiose enigma, alone. He’s up for it, doing award-worthy work by cutting through the narrative’s dense jungle of perplexing allegory to find a character who does what he wants for so long that he’s inspired to do what he thinks he must in order to be worthy of remembrance.

Memorable Dialogue: During his travels, Gawain encounters the legendary St. Winifred (Erin Kellyman):

Gawain: What is it I am looking for?

Winifred: My head.

Gawain: Your head is on your neck, my lady.

Sex and Skin: Some bits in the brothel, a crazy moment of just-out-of-frame heavy petting and/or intercourse resulting in seminal discharge.

Our Take: Gawain is aimless, and it makes sense that his hero’s journey-slash-fool’s quest is also aimless, although The Green Knight is one of those stories where one wonders if the protagonist’s random encounters off the journey’s primary path are actually the path he’s very much supposed to be taking, that Destiny has a sense of humor and is a trickster who very well knows that progress occurs only when one’s expectations are challenged and subverted. And so Gawain is robbed, meets a very famous ghost, tries talking to giants and visits a place whose denizens speak in ouroborosian riddles, and some of whom are played by cast members who also play other characters, just to further upend our heroic fool, and keep us firmly within his bewildered point-of-view.

So no, this film has not a MacGuffin — at least not one that’s visible, for perhaps the true reason for Gawain’s quest is it. Remember the wisdom of chasing wild geese. Also remember the wisdom applied journeys in relation to destinations, since the destination of all of our lives is the same: death. Maybe long, grueling walks — reflected in the film’s slow and steady pacing — through bogs and along precarious ridges aren’t so bad after all. I won’t attempt to trump centuries of analysis of symbolism and allegory in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but I will say that Lowery’s adaptation embraces classicism, in its multilayered and universal thematic suggestiveness, and modernism, in its visual presentation, which marries the otherworldly and the pragmatic like few films do. Lowery summons a fog, flips the horizon, focuses on a worm in the dirt, which may represent the ultimate lowliness of humanity in the scope of the universe, or might just be a worm in the dirt, because such things occur in English forests.

Lowery’s uncompromising vision results in a film that’s often dreamlike, as if we’re watching it through the bleary fuzz of half-mast eyelids; yet it’s also vivid and rich, like one of the unforgettable nightmares among the very, very few you remember for the way they jostled and disturbed your childhood. Its calculated contradictions make it a wondrously impossible film, so richly confounding, so truly hypnotic, so gorgeous to the eye, one is tempted to immediately rewatch it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Green Knight is stunning. I can only see it being better the third or fourth or fifth time through.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Green Knight