Starring Dev Patel, Ralph Ineson, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Barry Keoghan, Sean Harris and Kate Dickie

Directed by David Lowery

A24, in cinemas now; Amazon Prime Video available now

Not quite a knight and desperate to prove himself, Gawain agrees to the Green Knight’s game on Christmas Day and finds himself with a year to put his affairs in order and a year to become a knight.

Lowery’s darkly playful riff on the original 14th century poem puts the idea of adaptation itself front and centre. The King and Queen, Harris and Dickie in memorable cameos, are unable to keep pace with the world around them. The Scavenger, played with brutal charm by Keoghan, is absolutely at home in the moment and will kill anyone who threatens that, or him, or just who he feels like. Even the mysterious Lord (Edgerton) and Lady (Vikander in the better of her two roles) are defined by their refusal to adapt. Ideals trapped in amber, or perhaps, just perhaps, masks warn by someone else.

Then there’s Gawain. Patel has been leading man material his whole career and clearly revels in playing the held together by a green girdle (an important one too!) hot mess that is Gawain. He’s humble and awfully aware of how little he’s done. He’s arrogant and impulsive and literally drives the story by solving a problem with a hammer that could have been solved with a feather. He has no chill, no front and no idea and over the course of the movie the best scenes are always driven by Patel’s terrified not-quite-knight and his determination to be less of a terrible human.

That all comes to a head in the hallucinatory brilliance of the final hour. Aided by a fox who may or may not be real, may be himself and may be Essel his prostitute lover (Vikander’s first role, with a deeply bad accent) he never stops moving even when faced with possible real giants, his own infidelity and finally, his own destination. It’s here that Patel shines, as Lowery throws us into an exploration of Gawain’s possible future, drenched in blood, glory and failure. It’s pristine like a lucid nightmare, uniquely personal and driven entirely by the one thing no knight talks about and every knight feels:

Fear.

As the movie closes, that fear, along with the frantic need to live up to the expectations of others, turns it into a story about toxic masculinity and the expectations placed on men. Patel is brutally honest here, emotionally open in a way few actors would be brave enough to be and the ending is redemptive and hopeful whilst never losing the overgrown, feral terror of the Green Chapel. Aided by Ineson’s chillingly benevolent Green Knight, the movie brings an axe down on the pressures men place themselves under, but leaves us wondering if that’s the only axe it drops.

Verdict: The Green Knight is bleak, beautiful, obtuse and long. It’s not going to do you any favours but, like the debt at its core, it also refuses to go away. Push through because if you stick with it in its occasional moments of playful obtuseness there is so much to enjoy here. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart