A24's THE GREEN KNIGHT: AN ARTHURIAN LEGEND (2021) 1 1

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The Green Knight, A24’s long-awaited Arthurian horror film starring Dev Patel, will not be hitting cinemas as planned in the U.K.

 

The Hollywood Reporter has learned that the film, from writer-director David Lowery and also starring Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Barry Keoghan and Ralph Ineson, has been pulled from its scheduled launch on Aug. 6, with no new date given and U.K. cinemas advised to withdraw all trailers and posters until further notice. Entertainment Film Distributors is handling the U.K. release on the film.

 

Although there is as yet no official reason for the decision, the news — just two weeks before the film’s release — comes as U.K. is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 infection rates due to the Delta variant of the virus, with speculation that distributors are fearful of another imminent lockdown should the situation spiral out of control. However, one source suggested that a “streamer had dangled a deal that they couldn’t resist.” THR has reached out to Entertainment Film Distributors.

 

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An otherworldly Arthurian legend that owes as much to The Seventh Seal as to Excalibur, David Lowery’s The Green Knight is a dreamy mood piece that retells the classic hero’s journey as a hypnotic tale steeped in dark magic and supernatural horror. Just as the writer-director’s A Ghost Story reshaped the afterlife into an intensely emotional echo chamber of lingering love and loss, his new film slows down the action of a typical Camelot tale to deliver something richer, more thoughtful, yet laced with chivalric exploits and bizarre encounters. Led by Dev Patel at his most magnetic, this is a fantastical adventure in a genre all of its own.

 

With five features now under his belt, it’s safe to say that no two Lowery films are alike. Yet as disparate as they are, all of them share a deeply personal feel. That applies whether it’s the outlaw love story of his debut, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, or the interspecies boyhood friendship of Pete’s Dragon.

 

The A24 release will possibly be too weirdly enigmatic for mainstream tastes, but audiences willing to surrender to its unique spell will savor their time in Gawain’s World. The company is cleverly marketing a limited-edited original tabletop roleplaying game based on the film, which stands to boost its cult potential with fantasy fanatics.

 

The actors across the board are strong, notably Vikander, Choudhury and Harris, but this is Patel’s film and he commands every scene. His path from the dissolute libertine of the opening, wild and sexy, to the burdened man who embraces his fate with solemn maturity is a riveting transformation. And Lowery writes a novel ending that allows us to see in a moving vision the fork in Gawain’s destiny represented by his arrival at the Green Chapel.

 

This is a boldly unconventional film full of beguiling ambiguities, which eschews the hard-charging action and self-consciously modern attitudes that made the King Arthur entries of Antoine Fuqua and Guy Ritchie such generic duds. Instead, it embraces the strange remoteness of myth and Middle Ages lore on its own terms and creates something quietly dazzling and new.

 

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Arthurian legends have long been translated into sweeping dramas or sword-and-shield action epics, but there's never been any adaptation so surreal and strange as David Lowery's The Green Knight. The writer-director translates the chivalric romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into a fascinating adventure, rejecting the heart-racing thrills expected of this subgenre for pleasures far more cerebral.

 

Dev Patel puts a riveting new spin on Gawain, who, in his hunger for the glory of knighthood, accepts a Christmas challenge to confront the Green Knight, cutting him down with one intense blow. Dread rises when the Green Knight plucks up his severed head and rides away cackling, promising a grim reunion in one year. Smartly, Lowery’s -script spends little time on the intervening year, swiftly establishing that one brave act has not made Gawain a hero. Instead, it focuses on the arduous and unpredictable journey he sets out on, leading the impetuous hero through festering battlefields and fog-slathered forests to cross paths with ambushing thieves, a mournful spirit, howling giants, and a perplexing couple in a curious castle.

 

Verdict
The Green Knight is truly astounding. Defying the standards for Arthurian legend adaptations, it heavily favors atmosphere and mood over action and monologues. Substantial performances marry with director David Lowery's sumptuous style to create a film that is sensational, less about story than the experience. If you can get on the wavelength of such an artful quest, you’ll be rewarded. Once you’ve found that footing, The Green Knight is a heart-rattling, loins-riling, and head-spinning trip that packs a profound punch.

 

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All of which makes “The Green Knight” a vital and fascinating artifact. If “The Lord of the Rings” undergirds “Star Wars,” and the King Arthur saga undergirds “The Lord of the Rings,” what are we to make of a misty, lavishly scaled medieval odyssey, full of ghosts and magic and hallucinations and wandering, that adapts — and does its best to stay true to — “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” an epic poem of tormented romantic nobility, with links to the Arthurian legends, written by an anonymous author in the late 14th century? As a movie, “The Green Knight” feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry.

 

A true movie would tend to give into them. But Lowery, in dramatizing this quirky cousin of the other Arthurian legends, is going for the kind of de-melodramatization of the Middle Ages that Robert Bresson was celebrated for bringing off in his 1974 clanking-sword tone poem “Lancelot du Lac.” I’ve never been able to take that Bresson “masterpiece” (it’s about as exciting as watching spilled blood dry), but Lowery, with “The Green Knight,” has made a solemnly moving Christian parable that uses pagan elements to replay the interior thrust of the Christ story. Gawain says he’s pursuing “honor,” and in a sense that’s just what he does. From our vantage, though, what he’s really doing is confronting and accepting death — the place that his death has in the grand cosmos. Death, in this movie’s terms, is the sacrifice that God asks all of us to make for him. And the way that plays out in “The Green Knight” is to make Gawain the hero of a fantasy movie that’s a kind of anti-“Star Wars.” He imagines the life he might have had (like Willem Dafoe’s Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ”). But then he feels the Force of nature. And he gives himself up to the stars.

 

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Spinning off from the poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Lowery has shortened the title and turned it into a cinematic journey to remember. This all fits nicely into Lowery’s eclectic filmography, which started with Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and has proven wildly unpredictable as he veers from esoteric art films like the ethereal A Ghost Story to Disney remakes like Pete’s Dragon with Robert Redford. But as he says, this unique poem — one of Christianity, Paganism and numerous other things subject to all sorts of interpretation — has been rolling around in his head for the better part of 20 years. He finally knew it had the stuff of movies and just had to find the right way in. He has largely succeeded by casting Dev Patel as the somewhat cocky nephew of King Arthur, who was given entry into the Knights of the Round Table due to connections more than anything else.

 

Fans of epic tales like Lord of the Rings will find themselves transfixed with this intelligent and thought-provoking trip back to that time. It is no accident that LOTR author J.R.R. Tolkien was the man who first translated the poem, all written in verse, into the English language in 1925. This movie will prove we are still talking about it in 2021 and still deciphering what truths it holds.

 

Producers are Toby Halbrooks, Tim Headington, James M. Johnson, Theresa Steel Page, and Lowery. A24 opens it in theaters Friday.

 

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Overall: 9.0/10

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Went up with more critic reviews - not down

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Overall: 9.4/10

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Overall: Liked it to the point of loving it!

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Can’t wait. Looks awesome. Read it in college also. Sean Connery’s version, not so much. 

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Shocking. Metacritic goes down a point. Still, a strong showing so far.