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Fig 1: Alicia Vikander in the (C) A24 new film: The Green Knight (2021). LMK106-J7259-060821 Supplied by LMKMEDIA. Editorial Only. 

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Mercifully David Lowery’s 2021 film adaptation, The Green Knight includes both an artful and considered visual style (accompanied by Daniel Hart's strong score and accomplished cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo) with a good budget and a better overall intension from Lowery: greater directional focus and clear thematic, evidenced through his choices of what to include, what to emphasise and what to leave out. His film sees Ralph Ineson as the Green Knight and Dev Patel as Gawain. Describing Lowery’s Gawain as ‘introspective and oddly passive’, Aronstein and Drummond (2021) emphasise the way the audience are asked to question Gawain and his reality throughout the film. 

He moves through a dreamlike landscape, seeking meaning in a world that offers stark beauty but little in the way of answers. Lowery’s film does not explain its phenomena or justify its narrative beats. We, like Gawain, merely observe, grappling with uncertainty as his destiny plays out before us (Aronstein and Drummond, 2021:90).

The visual texture of Lowery’s film benefits from an evolved screen language for the fantasy genre (which did not exist for example when Weeks made his films). This has seen The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) (a direct reference for Lowery, see Welsh, 2021) and Game of Thrones (2011-2019) (Lowery’s makeup effect artist for the film Barrie Gower worked on GOT for six years) pioneer more serious, immersive and believable worlds. 

I asked David Lowery about his choices related to the Green Knight’s appearance, he explained his emphasis for the presentation in the film highlighting ‘readable-into-ness’ stating that ambiguity is also key in the original text and he didn’t want to lose that. Lowery also talked about the importance of female power (in the poem Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s sister and Lady Bertilak have key roles in testing Gawain). ‘At one point I even considered changing his countenance [the Green Knight’s] to more directly suggest the female authority represented by Morgan Le Fey. I wound up skewing closer to the description in the poem but hopefully his thematic role still comes through loud and clear’ (Lowery, in correspondence with the author 2021).

That thematic role does come through, and the tension between the indecisive young man and the potent women he encounters is perhaps the most abiding aspect of Lowery’s adaptation, building on the original text's feminist interpretations. The women in the film, while not the focus, are active, articulate, and morally resolute. This includes Sarita Choudhury as Mother (the Morgan le Fay role, in this case Lowery has imagined the sorceress as Gawain’s mother rather than his aunt as it is in the poem). ‘Mother’ is responsible for summoning the Green Knight in an act of blood magic and we are left feeling this is a prompt for her son to live up to (he is seen drinking and wasting time). Kate Dickie as Queen (Guinevere) intervenes when Gawain states he has no story, replying ‘yet’, again, a prompt to action. Alicia Vikander (see fig 1) is scene stealing as Essel, Gawain’s lower class love interest (not present in the original poem) and the Lady respectively (Bertilaks’s enchanting wife). These woman; the one honest, decent and neglected, the other wise, possessing status and independent, form a prism of criticism around Gawain who in contrast is neither decent or wise.