A24 Season: The Green Knight (Dir David Lowery, 2h9m, 2021)

The Arthurian mythos has had a bit of a raw deal when it comes to cinema; for what may be one of the original shared universes, formed in the 12th century from romances written by French and English authors, it's a sadly untapped vein of rich stories and tales. It is, undeniably, the closest that the English have to a creation myth-a primordial England brought into peace by a boy pulling a mystical sword from a stone, ruling over England with his knights before the appearance of the Holy Grail, their quests for it, and Arthur's eventual undoing at the hands of Morgana Le Fay and his nephew, Mordred. For such a rich text, that spans from boyhood adventures to knightly doings, from revenge to downfall in war, and with a vast cast of creatures, knights, and lords, Its cinematic outings are curiously mixed. For every Kid Who Would Be King (2019), which transfers TE White's Once and Future King to 21st century England or the smartly observed, slyly satirical Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), there's no shortage of adaptions that are more Mordredian than Arthurian.

These range from meandering sword and sorcery flicks that failed to kick-start a King Arthur cinematic universe (Guy Ritchie's bewilderingly bad King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)), the inevitable adaptions of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1931, 1995, 2001), kitsch and largely one-dimensional throwbacks (The Sword in the Stone (1963), Camelot (1967), Excalibur (1980)), or sludgy, sub-Gladiator historical revisionism (King Arthur (2003). This is without mentioning the looser adaptions, which range from the charming, if creaky BBC series, to the execrable Transformers: The Last Knight, to a female King Arthur summoned into another Grail War in the long-running and mind-bogglingly complex Fate anime/game franchise.

And then came The Green Knight, and with a flourish, with a sweep of the axe, all Arthurian adaptions that came before were cut down to size. For, from one of the oldest (the original text dates to the 14th Century), and most adapted (everyone from Tolkien (twice), to two poet laureates, to Stephen Weeks' two cinematic adaptions) tales of Arthurian mythos, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which the titular Sir Gawain must travel to the lands of the mysterious and not entirely human Green Knight to be seemingly beheaded, as part of a Christmas game and a challenge the Knight laid down, comes an otherworldly, spectacular, and cinematically stunning adaption from David Lowery that fully encapsulates what master distributors A24 have become, and what their impact on cinema will be.

I'm-in a word-surprised how long it's taken me to get to Lowery's filmography; from the revisionist Western, Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013), to (probably) the best adaption of Disney's unnecessary remake cycle, Pete's Dragon (2016), to the beautifully strange A Ghost Story (2017) and Robert Redford's cinematic farewell, The Old Man & the Gun (2018), Lowery has set out perhaps the most unique, and arguably most flawless filmography of any director working in modern cinema today. (Hell, I'm strangely confident that, alone among the auteurs and off-beat directors around, his adaption of Peter Pan out next year for Disney will retain his impeccable cinematic eye and ability as a storyteller).

Atop it all sits The Green Knight; we begin, not with the Camelot of Arthur, but that of Gawain (Dev Patel), who, no sooner crowned than bursts into flame, one of a series of strange, phantasmagorical and otherworldly images that practically haunt the film, that sets the tone for the rest of the film-a film lit by reds, oranges, and golds and encircled by that all encompassing, that all-pervasive green of rot and growth that will come with the arrival of the knight. Gawain awakes, not in the warmth but in the wet, and grey, and yet innately human world of the brothel, awoken by his lover Essel (one of two roles played by Alicia Vikander), who he only slowly and reluctantly leaves for his mother, his King and Camelot. It is here that the film begins to strip away the gildt, the illusion of Camelot-whilst Gawain's Mother, (heavily implied to be sorceress Morgana Le Fey, superbly played by Sarita Choudhury), is full of life, her feminised magic that is soon wrought to bring the Knight to Camelot that of growth and power-this is something that does not extend to Arthur (Sean Harris) and Guinevere (Kate Dickie).

For theirs is a kingdom, and a kingship, in decline, in decay; this is not the sprightly Arthur of Camelot or the shining king of Excalibur, but a tired old man, his kingdom beginning to fall apart around him, his days of heroism over, and regret ruling his every move-Arthur is weighed down by his guilt, commanding Gawain, his nephew with whom he has barely interacted in the young man's life, to sit by his side on this Christmas Day feast. Malgosia Turzanska, the film's costume designer, at once ladens Arthur and Guinevere down under plaques of their triumphs, affixed to their cloaks, and heavy metal crowns, and makes them near icons of veneration, veritable holy objects of an age fast disappearing as they, and the knights who made this kingdom, grow increasingly old and feeble. It's-and this is something that stretches back in time to the original tale-as much a picture of Christendom at the end of an imagined enlightened era before the darkness of the Saxon age took over, as it is, as the film slowly unfurls itself, the symbolism of the venerated and holy Arthur increasingly frail in the face of the fecund greenery. This is a king, and a kingdom, falling apart.

Into the grey and stone, into this ossuary of an age, through the bizarre and quasi-Jodorowsky-esque imagery of the ritual, the rite of greenery and curiously traditional letter writing, that brings him to Camelot, comes the Green Knight (played behind striking layers of makeup and prostheses by veteran British actor, Ralph Ineson); the film is steeped in the physical, the tangible, and Ineson is the biggest, and most impressive part of a film whose very production harks back to the 80s and early 90s way of making a film, where things can-and indeed, with few exceptions-do exist in-camera. This is a film of meticulous matte-paintings, of clever visual effects, of so little digital trickery that, when it does appear in the film, it's as impressive as it is striking. This colossal verdant figure's sudden appearance, and the possession of Guinevere by Morgana Le Fay's letter, upends the peace-the Knight's command is simple; one of Arthur's knights must deliver him a blow, and receive his axe; the following Christmas, that knight must travel to the Green Knight's lands, and have the same blow returned.

It is here that the storyless, the songless Gawain sees his chance, and, after Arthur hands him Excalibur, he approaches the passive knight, who, unmoved by Gawain's threats and growing confusion, simply lowers his head, and awaits the blow, that finally comes, taking the Knight's head off and leaving his body seemingly sprawling, blood oozing from his neck to stain the floors of Camelot; but, as the film will return to, again and again, this line between death and life, between decay and growth, is far more blurred than it would first appear, as, taking up his head, the Knight reminds the now horrified Gawain of their deal, and leaves Camelot atop his charger, his laughter following him as he rides off, head still dangling from his hand. It is the moment that The Green Knight stops merely being a solid, if somewhat visually ambitious Arthurian fantasy, and starts becoming something altogether more cinematically esoteric, and more exciting.

The year before the second part of the Knight's 'game' passes quickly, and almost wordlessly via a superbly done montage, the fame of Gawain itself already becoming mythologised, the beheading of the Knight becoming entertainment for children,, whilst he is at once lauded and finds himself in fights with, the population of Camelot, his hedonistic and unknightly life, his face bruised and his mother tending to him by the time he has another audience with Arthur, the older man even more worn down by regrets and the time lost to him to know his nephew better. Gawain, for his part, finds himself torn between his destiny, and the love of Essel, between knightly duty, something the film will expand upon greatly by the time that Vikander re-enters the film in her other role.) Soon, though, as the year changes ever-on, Gawain must keep his side of the bargain and it is here that the film, in a single sequence, opens up, as Gawain's adventure begins, with the young knight, now armed with a protective girdle from his mother, and followed only by a group of boys, setting his sights on the chapel supposedly inhabited by the knight.

The middle section of the film, between the door of Camelot, and the door of the towering and mysterious if warmly inviting Bertilak de Hautdesert (Joel Edgerton) and his wife (Vikander's other role) castle, like so many versions of the story, is a mixture of travelling, the ever-more battered and road-weary Gawain getting into scrapes, and visually arresting vignettes that run the gamut from Gawain assisting Saint Winifred in reclaiming her head and finding peace, to a bewildering if absolutely jaw-dropping encounter with colossal giants that tower over the English landscape, to Gawain imagining his own death and decay after being set upon by thugs in a directorial homage to Barry Lyndon (1975). It is here that Lowery begins to belie his influences; for, alongside the sensibility of the avant-garde, of the Acid Western dropped into Dark Ages England, there's a curious strain of the 80s fantasy movie in The Green Knight.

There are the obvious influences-the "Interlude" section of the film, before Gawain finds Bertilak and his wife, feels like a sequence from a missing Terry Gillam film, the giants, perhaps the film's greatest preponderance towards digital effects as strange, as sudden, and as otherworldly as they are curiously welcoming, their shared and quasi-human vocalisings-as-song with the fox feeling more like something from a fairy-tale than its surrounding moments. Camelot, for all that the film leans into the decay, and the world around it, is tinged, is undeniably in debt to 1981's Excalibur, and at points the atmosphere of the two films is palpable, even if The Green Knight lacks the sheen, or indeed the gilded age of the other film-this is the Arthurian age falling not with great battle-even if the film itself can't resist one in its elongated finale, but with a whimper to other, less saintly men.

Further afield, there's even the sense, both from a visual reference and from the entire sense of the mystical and the magical being just out of reach, and from how wonderfully this feeling is woven into how Lowery and his long-time cinematographer, Andrew Droz Palermo shoot the forests that press in around their young hero, in much the same way that George Lucas et al shot 1988's Willow, and shares much in terms of its fantastical and mundane elements rubbing shoulders throughout, and there is, undoubtedly a sense from Lowery's cinema of a love of this bygone age of cinema, of fantasy films like Ladyhawke and Legend and Excalibur, where visual effects work was real and tactile and these films were just as capable of being mysterious and otherworldly as they were as being entertaining

On the road north from Camelot, though, the film undeniably takes a turn into the surreal and the avant-garde, and it is here that, undeniably, we must compare The Green Knight to the beloved 1970s midnight movie, to El Topo (1970), to the work of Dario Argento, and undeniably to a Kurtzian/Coppolean descent into the Medieval underworld, streaked with the bloodied hands of gallio cinema, and its preoccupation with death, and into the surreal unrestrained unrelatity of Franco-Chilean maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky's most out-there works. If the Acid-Western has become an overused term, then step forward the first Acid Arthurian Epic. Things begin normally enough-Gawain makes his way across the kingdom, and encounters a battlefield, where the savagery of Arthur's kingship, where power is inflicted upon those without-and here he comes across Barry Keoghan's thief, who meditates upon his lot, and on the carnage, before offering Gawain directions. He soon catches up with the hapless adventurer with his gang, robs him blind, and leaves him trussed up and left for dead.

Dead is precisely, as the raiders disappear, and the film jumpcuts, where we find Gawain. His skeleton is trussed up, his skin gone, and all around this death, unnoticed, uncinematic, is the greenery of the world he has left. It's a curiously meditative moment. Here, lays out Lowery, as he will come on to return, spiralling in and out of this avant-garde heady mix of gallio, acid-drenched knight's tale and pure visual oddness, is one of Gawain's possible endings, waylaid by Kubrickian raiders, unable to get himself free, and consigned to a beggar's death. The forest carries on, whether Gawain is alive or dead in it. Another pan around, and Gawain is returned to us, whole, and resolute to escape his bonds, nicking himself on the sword that his would-be murderers left behind, but cutting himself free. He picks up his poseessions and readies himself for the road, and the film lingers on the shield he left Camelot with.

This shield, with his painted god, is broken in half. He must now trust an altogether less loving or forgiving god, as he begins his journey into the realm of this pagan god that is the forest and the wood, and, by extension, the foe that he is riding to meet. The centre of this film thus becomes both a trip...and a trip, a otherworldly and hallucinogenic descent into the interior of this decaying realm, where death is rife, and the barrier between it and life is transient-we soon, in an unnerving moment that flickers back and forth between geniune terror and gallows comedy, meet the hapless Saint Winifred, whose head transforms back and forth between skull and living flesh, until she is reunited with the rest of her body, and Gawain is reunited with the axe the knight bequeathed him. Gawain gets, presumably, high on psychotropic mushrooms in a rainstorm and wakes to find himself in a valley with colossal, wordless figures walking off into the distance. He befriends a fox that follows him on his journey across this strange and unwelcoming landscape. He arrives at the doorstep of the Lord and Lady, collapses, and soon finds himself awakening in a strange bed among strangers.

It is here, that, if anything, the film becomes stranger-the Lady and Lord seem, from their very first scene, something other, too knowing, and too welcoming-there's something, once again of the works of Gillam, but the entrapment in the niceties of existence, whilst, with the Lady in particular, with her vast collection of books, and strange possessions, including an unnervingly anachronistic camera, feels like a creature out of time and space, rather than a medieval lady. This unnerving sense, this sense of wrongness in the part of the story that in many other adaptions are fairly up-front with their focus upon illusion and Gawain being tested, culminates in two scenes, one in which the "return" of the girdle that Gawain's mother gifted him becomes a moment of shame, his knightly valour stripped away in a scene utterly without the intimacy or charm of the great Arthurian romances, and the other in which the film's entire philosophy, its greenness is laid bare. It's one of the great soliloquy of modern cinema, a meditation upon life and death, upon love, and new growth, upon decay, and endings.

Gawain flees, in shame, not before being accosted by the charming Lord, and kissed in a moment that raises once more those scholarly banners of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight being as much a work warning of the feminine whiles and manly prowess of the Arthurian age, less subtext as it is text, as it is a ripping yarn. Yet, the green that Gawain enters is oddly tinged-there's a sense of rot, of decay, the yellowish filter calling to mind the entry to the Zone of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, the fox suddenly given grating, faltering speech as it-or perhaps, given that the unmistakable tones of his Mother can be heard in its voice, she-warns him of his impending doom. He carries on, and soon finds himself face to face with his fate, with, of course, the greenery of the Chapel, and its denizen. Christmas Eve passes, from day to night, to day, and as Christmas dawns, so the Knight wakes, and, for a few moments, we are simply given green in one of its guises, the Knight softly spoken and strangely charming, a midwinterish figure, a promise of renewal, for Gawain and for the world in general.

And in comes Lowery's masterstroke. In comes the question of Green. In comes not one but two endings for Gawain. A Gawain who has become green himself with cowardice, and a Gawain at peace with his ending, with returning to the green, in all its meanings. He shows us a Gawain scared to lose his life. Protected by green, by the girdle, even stained with dishonour and unknightly deeds, we plunge, as Gawain shirks from the blows, and finally flees into the greenery of the forest, returns to Camelot, and lives out an entire life as Arthur's replacement, as his successor. We see a man living his life, guarded, and protected by green, but afraid to embrace it-Camelot is grey and stone, and we see Gawain become king behind its walls, birth a child with Essel, only to abandon her to seek yet more power. We see a king grow old and hated, shunned and mud-spattered by his people, and finally under siege and utterly beleagued, we see the girdle, the dishonour, the unknightly behaviour that has brought England to the brink of chaos, and beyond, come away, and Gawain finally succumbs, finally accepts his punishment, and his head falls away, to roll across the floor. The game is over.

Back we go. Gawain once more kneels at the feet of the Green Knight, but now he is resolute, now he is unafraid of the greenery, of death, and pulls the girdle off, and surrenders himself to the return of the blow he struck one Christmas ago. It does not come. What does is tenderness, what does is recognition of Gawain's bravery in the face of death, rather than the cowardice the film has spent nearly twenty minutes just unspooling. What comes, as the Knight drags a finger across Gawain's neck, is not death, nor life, but kind admonishment, a return of grace, and Gawain having, in either this world or down another path, having understood that, in the end, as the Lady so eloquently puts it, "This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it".

There is no winning against the march of green, there is no way to win a war or a battle against weeds and rot and moss, and if the film's ending symbolises anything, it is that Gawain is now keenly aware of this. In doing so, it perhaps captures something about the Arthurian age, about the Arthurian legendum that only perhaps Excalibur captures-it is a passing age, a short and fragile peace rent by war, by lust, by the encroaching and greedy forces that Gawain finds himself becoming. Arthur is an ageing man, and his mighty castles, and his power, and his peace are crumbling. The rot, the moss, is encroaching on everything the King has built.

How Lowery captures it though, is nothing short of a visitation, a reminder that in the world of A24, even something as writ, as over-exposed and over-adapted as King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table can be vibrant, full of life, and beautifully otherworldly and strange. It is, simply, the best Arthurian film, and certainly one of the best fantasy movies ever made. It is a film you can and will get lost in, a staggering masterpiece of a film, an otherworldly retelling of the Arthurian myth, a love-letter to the 80s fantasy movie, and a spectacular yarn of a movie in which a young knight must travel through a decaying, and fantastical land, to repay a strange debt.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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