THE GREEN KNIGHT
Clockwise from main: The axeman cometh — Dev Patel as Gawain;
★★★★★
DIRECTOR David Lowery
OUT NOW CERT TBC / 125 MINS
CAST Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Ralph Ineson, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Barry Keoghan
PLOT Gawain (Patel) lives a charmed life in Camelot, dining at the famed Round Table with his uncle, the legendary King Arthur (Harris).
When a mysterious Green Knight (Ineson) arrives with a challenge, Gawain embarks on an epic quest to prove his honour.
DAVID LOWERY LOVES death. Or at least, he seems morbidly fascinated by it. It loiters, phantom-like, throughout his idiosyncratic, consistently accomplished filmography: from the orphan who processes grief for his parents via a friendly flying monster in Pete’s Dragon, to the career criminal confronted by his final years in The Old Man And The Gun, to a literal dead person (aka Casey Affleck with a bedsheet on his head) in A Ghost Story. Death gives David Lowery’s films life, and it beats at the weird, transgressive heart of The Green Knight, Lowery’s sixth — and likely best — film.