Everything You Need to Know About A24's 'The Green Knight'

Image via A24 Films

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. 

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?

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.

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.