The Green Knight (2021)
Directed by David Lowery
An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain, King Arthur's reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men.
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These intriguing questions are enough to hold one’s interest in the absence of physical forward motion, and, before long, our man finds himself at his true destination, whereupon he more fully wrestles with the very concepts that launched him on his journey — dubious motivations that inspire meditations on nothing less than the meaning of life — via a sequence reminiscent of the penultimate stretch in The Last Temptation of Christ .
While the poem concludes in a joyful reversal that reflects the spiritual renewal of the New Year, the filmmaker opts for a more sober and uncertain ending that evokes no less a film than The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).
Lowery, never shy about wearing influences on his sleeve, borrows a little from both, while nodding also to the controversial revisionism of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and to the allegorical dread (and talking fox!) of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist .
Lowery presents this theme with such an assured hand that comparisons can be made to Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), in which a character struggles to embrace their morals in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Lowery attempts an equally audacious movement here–a full fifteen minutes without dialogue, spanning decades in an amazing homage to “The Last Temptation Of Christ.”
He imagines the life he might have had (like Willem Dafoe’s Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ”).
Appropriately for an adaptation of a poem once translated by Tolkien, there are occasional hints of Middle-earth, and Lowery clearly relishes realising boyhood fantasies of fantasy (he has previously cited Ron Howard’s Willow as an early inspiration).
The Green Knight’s aesthetic is built on a wildly diverse collection of cinematic references: There are touches of everything from sincere 80s fantasies such as Ladyhawke and Willow to the more transgressive work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Lars von Trier (including one CGI-rendered character familiar to viewers of Antichrist).
With inspiration from films such as Willow , The Dark Crystal , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , The Green Knight is a slow-burning, character study.
Lowery’s cine-literacy also points to his eclectic influences — Terrence Malick’s stamp is all over his first film; the visual textures of The Old Man & the Gun are right out of ‘70s New Hollywood; the transfixing rhythms of A Ghost Story take their cue from the haunting slow-cinema lyricism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul; and the director acknowledges Ron Howard’s Willow as a key ‘80s-throwback inspiration on this new film, which nonetheless feels entirely original in its imaginative world-building.
The path for Lowery to this medieval tale apparently resulted when he came across some action figures from Ron Howard’s Willow , a 1988 period tale that also featured a perilous journey.
Lowery has cited multiple films that influenced him over the years as he worked to bring The Green Knight to life onscreen: Willow , Bram Stoker's Dracula , The Dark Crystal , Marie Antoinette , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , a 1928 French silent film by Carl Dreyer.
The most Gilliamesque (a director I was frequently reminded of) moment, unfortunately brief, is with the giants – who are blankly staring alien-like beings reminiscent of Fantastic Planet (1973).
Gawain’s brush with a plucky miscreant (played by Barry Keoghan) on a corpse-strewn battlefield is equal parts “The Mists of Avalon” and “Come and See,” while a jaw-dropping encounter with a clan of bald-headed giants borrows from René Laloux’s “Fantastic Planet” as the film’s (relatively) grounded first half gives way to the unmoored fantasy of its second.
Giants that evoke the design of the creatures in “Fantastic Planet” aren’t so much intimidating as they are lonesome and magic is as obvious as a trick of the light.
Lowery has cited Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V as inspirations; the film also hints at John Boorman’s Arthurian extravaganza Excalibur and Guillermo del Toro’s sylvan fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth.
Director John Boorman certainly did with his 1981 "Excalibur," which was a reprise of one of the old Camelot tales, featuring Arthur and Merlin and Morgan le Fay, as well as the Knights of the Round Table, the Lady of the Lake and so on.
Written and directed by David Lowery, this adaptation has its influences in everything from the original surviving text to elements of Sean Connery’s Sword of the Valiant and John Boorman’s Excalibur.
Even unassailable classics of the genre such as The Thief of Bagdad , Excalibur , and The Lord of the Rings feel unmistakably like features made in 1940, 1981, and the early 2000s, respectively.
Pitched between John Boorman’s extravagant Excalibur and Robert Bresson’s austere Lancelot du Lac, Lowery’s grungy and gloomy fantasy epic (in theaters July 30) has deconstruction on its mind, and those heady concerns ultimately enhance its beguiling intrigue and terror.
It’s Excalibur (1981) retold for adolescents, without the unsettling and aggressive acts of sexuality.
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The Green Knight reminded me in subtle ways of a lot of other films I’d seen – Darren Aronofksy’s The Fountain , Robert Eggers’ The Witch , even Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal as just a few examples – while at the same time feeling unlike anything I’d seen before.
With inspiration from films such as Willow , The Dark Crystal , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , The Green Knight is a slow-burning, character study.
Lowery has cited multiple films that influenced him over the years as he worked to bring The Green Knight to life onscreen: Willow , Bram Stoker's Dracula , The Dark Crystal , Marie Antoinette , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , a 1928 French silent film by Carl Dreyer.
Instead, it’s reminiscent of the artsy sterility of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man , except you don’t get the sense that Lowery hates the genre he’s working in.
Lowery's obsessively crafted mise en scene occasionally brings to mind the work of director Robert Eggers (“The Witch,” “The Lighthouse”), though movie buffs will likely also detect the influence of trippy midnight fare like the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and cult curios like Jim Jarmusch's black and white Western “Dead Man.”
Buyer beware: this extremely peculiar medieval movie owes less to “Game Of Thrones” and more to acid Westerns like “El Topo” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man.” (A more accurate title might have been “The Assassination of the Green Knight by the Coward Sir Gawain.”)
Lowery, never shy about wearing influences on his sleeve, borrows a little from both, while nodding also to the controversial revisionism of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and to the allegorical dread (and talking fox!) of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist .
The Green Knight’s aesthetic is built on a wildly diverse collection of cinematic references: There are touches of everything from sincere 80s fantasies such as Ladyhawke and Willow to the more transgressive work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Lars von Trier (including one CGI-rendered character familiar to viewers of Antichrist).
What we do have is a talking fox, imported from Lars von Trier’s no less arboreal “Antichrist” (2009), plus an introduction to Gawain’s mother (Sarita Choudhury), a sorceress of many charms, and a cameo appearance from a gang of passing giants.
In these moments, Lowery evokes everything from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Where the Wild Things Are to Prometheus .
As far as King Arthur films go, “The Green Knight” has a lot more in common with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” than most newer, high-energy takes, such as Guy Ritchie’s “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.”
They’re also subtly funny, though, in ways that can’t help but conjure images from the more ubiquitous and absurd Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The mythical, adventure-packed drama The Green Knight is the best Arthurian adaptation this side of Monty Python and the Holy Grail .
When the forgettable Guy Ritchie King Arthur movie came out a few years ago I was making jokes in my head about Monty Python and the Holy Grail the entire time; I did none of that for Green Knight .
His underreaction to his beheading brings John Cleese’s “a mere flesh wound” (“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) to mind.
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While the original poem references Welsh geography, the filmmakers chose Irish locations in County Wicklow, with the 12th century Cahir Castle in County Tipperary (a site used in Excalibur and Barry Lyndon ) standing in for Camelot.
On top of the narrative mystery, the grand scale of the journey is in the scope of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia , and the impeccable visual stylings could be equal to that of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon .
Lowery shot much of the film in County Wicklow in Ireland, with scenes in a castle previously glimpsed in John Boorman’s take on Arthurian legend, Excalibur , and in another tale of a young man fumbling his way forward, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon .
Lowery has cited Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V as inspirations; the film also hints at John Boorman’s Arthurian extravaganza Excalibur and Guillermo del Toro’s sylvan fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth.
There are Dutch painters you could call out here—Brueghel with fewer figures within a denuded landscape—as well as scenes of pillage and splash and splatter in Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev,” but the design research for “The Green Knight” is absorbed into its wholly realized world.