The Green Knight’s Ending, Explained

This post contains spoilers for The Green Knight as well as the 14th-century poem it’s based on. Beware!

Director David Lowery’s highly anticipated film, The Green Knight, is adapted from the anonymously written 14th-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which most English majors have had to read at least once. It tells a rather simple story about King Arthur’s nephew Sir Gawain, who accepts a challenge from a supernaturally oversized knight on New Year’s Eve—and has one year to deliver on his side of the bargain. On his journey to find the Green Knight, Gawain encounters the usual Arthurian tests of honor and character, and comes out the other side a little more worse for wear than some of his fellow knights of the Round Table.

Even those very familiar with the poem might be confounded by elements of Lowery’s adaptation starring Dev Patel. And while some aspects are intentionally vague, in a long-ranging chat with Vanity Fair, Lowery did his best to clear up some mysteries—starting, of course, with that very puzzling ending.

Okay, Did Gawain Die or…What? Well, yes and no, right? In the poem, after some flinching, Gawain takes his blows without ever taking off the magical green girdle (or belt, if you prefer) protecting him. In order to tease Gawain for his deceit, the Green Knight gives Gawain a little nick on the neck as punishment. Gawain goes home and lives out his life while wearing the sash as a mark of his shame. Lowery, however, had something else in mind.

In the film, the lengthy section following Gawain back to Camelot, onto the throne, and through the fall of his kingdom was foreshadowed by an earlier moment where a tied-up Gawain envisions his own skeletal corpse in the woods, only to have the camera spin back and show him alive and well. So we can assume that everything we see back at Camelot, including Gawain’s head falling off, is a long “what if?” sequence in which Gawain imagines what his life might have been like if he escaped the Green Knight’s chapel alive, but carrying the shame and deceit of having failed at his promise.

Lowery wanted to use that extended sequence to achieve something very specific: “I wanted to write an ending where his head gets chopped off, and that’s a positive thing,” he says. “That’s a happy ending. He faces his fate bravely, and there’s honor and integrity in that. But that doesn’t mean that he’s dead, he’s killed. He received the blow that he was dealt, and all is set right within the universe of the film.” We, the audience, are relieved when Gawain accepts his fate in the end, because it spares both him and his kingdom all the misery of that war-torn fantasy. We also get to see his head both come off and not.

Lowery said he shot a more “explicit” and “definitive" version of the ending, but that it put “too sharp” a point on the film: “If people were to watch a movie in which Dev Patel gets beheaded at the end, they probably would like to leave the theater feeling differently than they do with the more ambiguous version.” That ambiguity may leave the ending open to interpretation, which Lowery is fine with. “Even amongst ourselves—Dev, my producers, and I—we all had slightly different ideas about what that ending [means]. If we cut to black, what happens next?” Let’s call it the Sopranos approach to medieval fantasy.