I have to be honest here, the only David Lowery film that I have seen has been A Ghost Story (2017) and that one, much like The Green Knight has already, has divided audience opinion. The Green Knight has been sitting on my news page for quite a while and I have anticipated its release for longer than that! Its delayed release saw it skip most cinemas in the UK finding it’s main release on Amazon Prime. It’s an A24 production and if you know me you know I lurrrve my A24 films. I have already listed my favourites in the news story, but I’ll leave them below this review.
The Green Knight is a re-telling of a 14th century story entitled Sir Gawain and The Green Knight and it is one of the best-known stories that includes King Arthur.
The wonderful, incredibly talented Dev Patel plays Gawain a wannabe Knight of King Arthur’s (Sean Harris) round table. Gawain spends most of his time, drunk and in questionable locations but longs for something more of his life. His very protective mother played by Sarita Choudhury is seemingly disapproving of his frivolities and wants to help him be a better man.
One Christmas, as everyone is gathered with the King, a Knight appears at the door to the hall. This is no ordinary Knight standing at what seems around 7ft tall, his armour made from branches an imposing figure and ultimately terrifying. He wants to play a Christmas game, he wants the bravest knight to take him on in a fight, and if they can land a strike on him, next Christmas, they must seek him out and he gets to deal the same damage to them.
Gawain steps forward wanting to prove himself, but wait, the strike he deals to the knight is to take his head off! So, doesn’t that mean that next Christmas Gawain loses his head? Crazy. Over the next year Gawain spends his time doing little more other than drinking and whoring and develops little courage. As Christmas approaches, he readies himself and sets off in search of the Green Knight to finish this very, very strange ‘game’.
At this point I like to talk about the performances, which are fantastic. I haven’t seen Dev Patel produce a bad performance in any film even his first performance in Slumdog Millionaire (2008) won him many accolades, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) saw a solid performance, but for me, Lion (2016) was his best. Ralph Ineson is even putting in a great piece from what we can see from behind all the prosthetics as the Green Knight.
On his travels to find the Green Knight, Gawain faces what seems to be many tasks and trials in which he is constantly told that ‘he’s no knight’. You can feel the purpose of all of this is for him to prove himself, so show he is good of heart and worthy of the title ‘Knight’.
The visuals are incredible and the landscape in which it is filmed is beautiful, it all has a constant dream sequence feel but the pacing of this film will definitely frustrate the common film goer looking for a ‘brain at the door’ type of film. It can, at points, feel quite slow but the over 2hr run time kept me engrossed.
I won’t discuss the ending here but there have been many interpretations on what the ending means and what actually happened. Don’t expect this to be wrapped up in a nice, neat little package, you will have to do some thinking.
I really did enjoy The Green Knight and recommend that you watch it now on Amazon Prime!
My top films A24 have been involved with: Moonlight (2016), A Ghost Story (2017), The Florida Project (2017), Lady Bird (2017) Hereditary (2018), Mid90s (2018), Midsommar (2019) The Lighthouse (2019) Uncut Gems (2019).
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