‘The Green Knight’ is the Dirtiest, Horniest King Arthur Story Ever

The first time we meet Dev Patel‘s Gawain in The Green Knight, he’s just trying to get laid. His lower class lover Essel (Alicia Vikander, in the first of dual roles), teases him, leading him through a very active brothel on Christmas Day. Gawain is not a knight yet, but a noble youth content to waste time with his lover since he thinks he has time to be a hero. Then, fate hands him a quest. A mysterious Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) crashes the court of King Arthur (Sean Harris). And thus starts the action of writer-director David Lowery’s new film, The Green Knight, the first movie since the 1980s classic Excalibur to respect how dirty and horny medieval literature was.

The Green Knight is an adaptation of the famous medieval poem known as “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” As in the film, the story opens on a Christmas feast in Camelot. Everyone’s having a great time when suddenly a green knight — as in his body, face, hair, and everything are green — arrives wanting to challenge the Knights of the Round Table to a game. He asks for someone to try and land one blow on his body. Then, in one year’s time, that same man must journey to the Green Chapel to willingly take the same blow, this time from the Green Knight, on his person. The eager young Gawain leaps at the opportunity and believes he has beaten the game by chopping the Green Knight’s head off.

But the Green Knight doesn’t die. He just picks up his head and rides off laughing. Meaning honor demands that Gawain meet him — and his death — one year hence.

One of the tricky things about understanding medieval literature in modern times is how much of the weirdness of the text often gets ironed out in contemporary English translations. Verses are stretched into paragraphs, old bawdy slang smothered into something safe for school kids, and the visceral nature of the words the original poet used replaced with, well, something plain. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” has endured through the centuries because it’s anything but plain. It is a beguiling text full of raw earth, lofty aspirations, and mystery. It’s also got a weird sex game with a married couple who can best be described as “swingers.”

David Lowery understands this. He also clearly has read medieval literature beyond “Sir Gawain.” Medieval culture was obsessed with the intersection of religion and reality, death and sexuality. Saints names and pilgrimages are thrown into medieval texts with the same frequency as gory scenes and dirty nicknames for genitalia. The Green Knight perfectly encapsulates the feeling of reading Middle English and realizing just how strange, sexy, scary, and holy the story unraveling before you is.

The only other film that comes close to capturing the vibe of medieval literature was indeed John Boorman’s Excalibur. That movie reveled in the sex, violence, and majesty of the Arthurian legends. However I think that Lowery’s The Green Knight is the true masterpiece. It is a knotty, gorgeous, troubling film, in the most perfect way. The colors leap forth like scenes from an illuminated manuscript and Dev Patel wears the weight of Gawain’s insecurity even better than that goldenrod cloak.

The Green Knight is the first and only film to get how dirty, horny, and superstitious the world of Arthurian legends truly was.

Where to stream The Green Knight