Image via A24 Films
A24 seldom fails to evoke emotion from their viewers with any film they release, and David Lowery’s The Green Knight seamlessly follows suit. In true minimalist horror fashion, we are gifted with a medieval fantasy with lots of room for ambiguity and lingering questions; which led me to watch it twice. From Dev Patel starring as Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, to an unconventional Arthurian journey, to the immense amount of witchcraft, and even down to the color scheming, the film beautifully envelops elements of the 14th century poem it’s based on while creating its own narrative of a nearly hopeless protagonist; The Green Knight is constructed to make you feel its hero’s failure and shame all while taking you through the journey of his search for greatness.
From sorcery to heroism, here’s everything you need to know about The Green Knight. CAUTION: Spoilers are ahead, but you won’t fully understand it until you see it for yourself anyways.
The origin story
Lowery’s The Green Knight, is based on the poem “Sir Gawain and The Green Knight,” composed by an anonymous poet in the late 14th century; was first translated into modern English in 1925 by J. R. R. Tolkien. In the story, Sir Gawain (who is already a knight), accepts a challenge from a supernaturally oversized knight (The Green Knight) to land a blow upon him—and has one year to allow the knight to deliver the same blow. Rather than a typical legend of the Round Table, Lowery frames this as a “coming-of-age” story, giving the film a modern resonance despite its setting. Both the original poem and the film allow for the battle of paganism versus secular religion to remain crucial to the tale but Lowery morphs several elements of the original poem to not only include more witchcraft but to shift the majority of the film into Gawain’s perspective of the things happening to him due to the causes of witchcraft.
While you don’t need to read the original to watch the film, it’s interesting to notice the artistic differences within this rendition against the original poem.
The underdog hero
Dev Patel flawlessly delivers the thirst to belong that Gawain embodies as a core element of his character. We’re introduced to Gawain in a brothel with a woman who we understand to somewhat be his girlfriend, drowning his patheticness in a pint and being asked a question that seemingly haunts him: “Are you a knight yet?” Unlike the original poem, The Green Knight’s Gawain is not yet a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table; this version of our protagonist shows an afraid and flawed yet ambitious nephew of King Arthur, waiting for the opportunity to prove himself. This essence of being flawed is challenged in every step of his journey, with a multitude of tests being thrown his way in which he almost always comes out victorious or at the very least alive, but far from flawless.
We witness an unconventional hero who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be. Patel’s Gawain undergoes a journey that is ultimately more existential than it is physical. He starts off as a lost and waning child with fixed ideas about honor and courage, and he ends as a man shaken to his core by the mysteries he has witnessed and the lessons he has learned, both in the outside world and within himself.
The witchcraft
In Lowery’s adaptation, the introduction of witchcraft and of the Green Knight as an entity becomes much more personal with Gawain’s mother, Morgana/Morgan le Fay, being the sorceress who created him and this creation spell being the first form of sorcery within the film. The aspect of paganism versus secular religion is emphasized at the start of Gawain’s journey, where we receive mirrored images of King Arthur and his queen praying over Gawain and his weapons with a priest while his mother and her peers are chanting protection spells and hexing a scarf to protect Gawain from harm. Continuous post-mortem imagery (especially skeletons) is then seen on our hero’s journey, symbolizing Gawain’s cowardly fear of death, which he admitted to prior to leaving Camelot. He eats mushrooms at some point and starts hallucinating, which opens a door for so many questions but ultimately leads us to meet the characters Lord Bertilak, the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, doubling as Gawain’s girlfriend from the brothel) and a blindfolded elderly woman (who mirrors his mother when she blindfolded herself to create the Green Knight). In the original poem, Morgana openly admits to possessing the Lord and the Lady but Lowery makes everything much more complicated. The story continues to reveal itself as a mother and son drama in unconventional ways because her being the creator of the Green Knight begs us to question her intentions in even creating this antagonist, and her surely being an elderly woman, begs us to question how much of Gawain’s journey and the trials he encountered upon it were natural or tailor-made?
The importance of honor
In questioning the genesis of the Green Knight, you may arrive at the conclusion that a man had to be made out of Gawain, who was hopelessly in search of purpose and honor from start to finish—framing the quest as one of honor. In every obstacle Gawain comes across, he is perceived as a knight until he falters and is called out. We see it when he fears death after getting looted and tied up, we see it when he encounters the supernatural St. Winifred and she tells him, “A Knight should know better,” and we see it at the castle when he falls to the temptation of the Lady and she embarrasses him to say “You’re no knight.” Every test prematurely labels him a Knight and emphasizes how a Knight “should act,” far removing Gawain from honor and conventional notions of “knighthood” throughout his quest.
The importance of honor really circles back at the end when he runs away from finishing his quest and after a 15-minute interlude that serves as Gawain’s “what if,” we arrive back at the moment of his soon-to-be death that he seemed to scurry away from. This essential “what if” is probably the most crucial part of the film. We see guilt and shame slowly consume Gawain internally (with the same enchanted scarf protecting him from harm) and, in turn, externally (with what is probably the 3rd or 4th beheading in the film). The first time we are met with any certainty in Gawain’s eyes is in the final scene when he finally grasps that an honorable death is worth more than a wasteful and deceitful life.
The colors
Being a filmmaker of images and soundscapes rather than of words, Lowery presents us long stretches with no dialogue at all, only Daniel Hart’s eerie and roughly period-appropriate score to enhance the scene set for us. Everything in this film is muted in color from the grayness of Camelot to the dull grey of knights in armor. Against that subdued palette, the greenness of the Green Knight appears otherworldly in a sense.
Overall, green is used in the film intentionally to represent transformation and disguise from the Green Knight’s hue to the green aura signifying the possession of the Queen when reading his letter. The phrase of someone “being green” meaning they’ve had little experience of life or of a role also ties Gawain into the premise of greenery being scarce but significant. We encounter the brightest imagery/weather in the film with yellow hues at the green chapel, welcoming Gawain and his death with warm arms of relief and peace, which is a stark contrast to the coloring of the rest of the film. As the Lady puts it in a monologue at the heart of the film, “Red is the color of lust, but green is what red leaves behind,” and whether that green is the green of rot or of flourishment (grass is greener) is a question of how consequences unfold.
The remaining questions
We know you still have questions! “So does Gawain die at the end?” Let’s call that a Sopranos approach to wrapping up this medieval fantasy. “Does his mother hate him?” I guess that’s complicated. “What’s up with the fox that accompanies him throughout and why could he talk at the end? Did those large bodies in the fog have any deeper importance? Who’s the weird guy in Camelot with the tattoos under his eyes?” Listen, I watched it twice and I still have some things to ask Mr. Lowery myself, was the enchanted scarf the main physical element of importance to Gawain’s journey, or how do you fully gauge the relationship between Gawain and his mother with such little background? The beauty of the film is in its ambiguity and openness for individual interpretation, so I’ll charge my questions to the game.