“The Green Knight” Wields Intermittent Magic

Among the highlights of David Lowery’s latest film, “The Green Knight,” are the crowns. As worn by King Arthur (Sean Harris) and his queen (Kate Dickie), they come with built-in halos, which are attached to the back at ninety degrees, like the open lid of a tin can—handy for reminding your subjects that you rule by divine right. Students of Arthurian custom will also note Lowery’s take on the Round Table, which is more of a ring, with room in the middle for capering jesters, blackjack dealers, and the like. Watch this space.

Into Arthur’s hall, without an invitation, comes a figure on horseback—the Green Knight, played by the splendid Ralph Ineson, who starred with Dickie in “The Witch” (2015). Nothing but his voice, which makes a bass drum sound like a piccolo, tells us that this is Ineson, for his features are clad in rough bark; he is part tree, like an Ent in “The Lord of the Rings,” and he creaks as he moves. (In a film full of noises, which is worthy of savoring with your eyes shut, the most resonant is the steely, clattering hiss that greets the intruder when Arthur’s men draw their swords.) It is Christmas, wreathed with pagan ritual and Christian piety alike, and the Knight bears an axe and a branch of holly. He is armed with a festive wager, too: Who will strike him with a single swing of a blade, and then, a year and a day hence, accept a blow in return? As Arthur remarks, in a sinister whisper, “Remember, it is only a game.”

“The Green Knight” is described onscreen, in suitably antiquated fonts, as “A Filmed Adaptation of the Chivalric Romance by Anonymous.” The romance in question is a long English poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which was most likely written in the late fourteenth century. The poet promises to tell his tale “as hit is stad and stoken / In stori stif and stronge”—or, as rendered by J. R. R. Tolkien, “as it is fixed and fettered / in story brave and bold.” If the language of the original, thorny with alliteration, has proved as tempting and as testing to modern translators—including the poets W. S. Merwin and Simon Armitage—as the challenge thrown down in Arthur’s court, how much tougher is the task of conveying, in a movie, even scraps of so distant a legend?

One option is to snap the whole thing awake. Thus, the sleeping Gawain (Dev Patel) gets a bucket of water tossed over him by his low-born lover, Essel (Alicia Vikander), whose accent wanders like a travelling minstrel. Somebody calls out to him, “You a knight yet?” “Not yet,” he says. “Better hurry up,” comes the reply. Here, we gather, is not Gawain the paragon of gallant virtues, as he is hymned in the poem, but Gawain the lad—lusty, hasty, and unsure of his noble vocation. Later, though, it is he who responds to the Green Knight’s dare; who decapitates him; who looks on as his victim calmly retrieves the head (which gives a defiant laugh) and departs; who is therefore honor-bound to embark on a quest, enduring many perils en route; and who, as the year dwindles, meets the woody stranger once again, and awaits the axe’s bite.

In short, the film is an uneasy blend of the bygone and the new. Gawain fulfills the demands of his Yuletide pledge, and, as in the poem, he takes refuge on his journey at a lonely castle, where the lord (Joel Edgerton) supplies a warm welcome and his wife (Vikander again, now with improved elocution) makes it warmer still, much to Gawain’s discomfort. Yet what we witness in his chamber is, if anything, less carnally candid than what we read on the page—“Hir brest bare bifore, and bihinde eke”—and the bloodshed, too, is diluted. The hunting scenes on which the poet lavishes great care, sparing no detail of gutting and butchering, are nowhere to be seen. (Lowery is a longtime vegan.) What we do have is a talking fox, imported from Lars von Trier’s no less arboreal “Antichrist” (2009), plus an introduction to Gawain’s mother (Sarita Choudhury), a sorceress of many charms, and a cameo appearance from a gang of passing giants. Above all, we get to hear the line “You’ll be my lady, and I’ll be your man,” which would have surprised Tolkien, one of the poem’s most distinguished editors, and which suggests that the culture of courtly love was au fait with the work of Celine Dion.

Yet “The Green Knight” wields a peculiar magic, the reason being that Lowery—as he showed in “A Ghost Story” (2017), which ranged with ease over centuries—is consumed by cinema’s capacity to measure and manipulate time. Observe the marvellous sequence in which Gawain, trussed up by bandits, lies on a forest floor. The camera pans around through three hundred and sixty degrees; finds him reduced to a skeleton; circles back in the opposite direction; and finally alights on him, now alive and about to break free of his bonds. What might happen and what does happen are thereby fused within one shot, and the fusion recurs toward the movie’s end, when Gawain, to his shame, flinches from the axe and runs away. As in a vision, we see him returning home, inheriting the crown, losing all joy, and watching his reign collapse. Such, we understand, is what would befall him were he to fail in his chivalric duty, and such is the irony that fires this film: it is when the director follows his own path that he finds himself on the overgrown track of the poet from long ago, whose name we shall never know.

Without wishing to point the finger at witchcraft, I’d say that the kinship between “The Green Knight” and “John and the Hole,” a new movie from the Spanish director Pascual Sisto, surpasses mere coincidence. Sisto picks up the spell that is cast by Lowery’s tale, verdant with danger, and continues to weave.

“John and the Hole” is set in the wilds of New England; not the deepest wilds, because a short drive brings you to a town, but deep enough. Here, in a quiet and fancy house, live Brad (Michael C. Hall), his wife, Anna (Jennifer Ehle), and their children, Laurie (Taissa Farmiga) and her younger brother, John (Charlie Shotwell). John is thirteen, with days to fill and Lord knows what on his mind. Expressively blank, like a handless clock, he sports a long lock of hair that flops over his brow; so did the youth who teamed up with the cyborg in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), but John can boast no such adventures. He has to invent his own. One night, for no reason that he is willing to share, he uses his mother’s sleeping pills to drug his family, then hauls them outside, into the woods, and lowers them into a pit. And there, for most of the story, they remain.

The pit, we learn, is a bunker, dug as part of a construction project that was started by persons unknown but never finished. Other remnants of the project lie nearby: stone-gray chunks that resemble a Neolithic dolmen. In line with that sense of historical vertigo, the captives seem to fall out of the here and now; exposed to the elements, for the hole has no cover, they grow filthy and then sluggish, slumbering as if in hibernation. Later, when John lets down a bucket of food, they scrabble at it with bare paws. Brad, in particular, after an initial protest—“You are in so much trouble, little man,” he says to his son—begins to slump. How swiftly and with what docility, according to Sisto’s film, the prosperous American male is unmanned. “I’ve never been hungry before,” Brad admits. The creature without his comforts scarcely exists.

Anna and Laurie, as you’d expect, make more of an effort to engage with John, yet the movie is largely unconcerned with them—a real pity, with performers as strong as Ehle and Farmiga in the frame. It’s almost as if Sisto were allowing John’s indifference, and his torpor of spirit, to infect the entire proceedings. Shotwell is scarily plausible in the role, presenting us not simply with a sociopath but, below that, with a bored boy who searches for kicks and rehearses an adulthood that he both craves and dreads. He drives the family car; he cooks a risotto, following a recipe from a laptop; and, when a friend of his mother’s, Paula (Tamara Hickey), shows up, he tells her that his parents are away and, at his creepiest, entreats her to stay. He also inquires into her age: “How does it feel?” he asks. “To be fifty?”