Gawain in the Gloaming

A reluctant knight, a mythic challenge, and an evergreen question: What does it all mean?

- ALISON WILLMORE

Dev Patel in The Green Knight.

WHEN THE GREEN KNIGHT begins, Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) is just a kid, reluctant to commit himself to anything more than medieval carousing. “I’ve got time!” he insists when asked if he has managed to become a knight. “I’m not ready yet.” The first time the camera pulls back through the window of what turns out to be a house of ill repute, it finds him sprawled in unbothered slumber on a bed belonging to his favored companion, Essel (Alicia Vikander), looking more like a shipping heir on perpetual vacation than the member of King Arthur’s Round Table that he is. It’s good to be Gawain, beautiful and carefree and a nephew to the king (Sean Harris), the one who is invited to sit by the great man’s side during the yuletide feast. It’s good to be Gawain until we see his uncertainty, the quivers of fear that he’s not putting off greatness so much as he’s incapable of achieving it. Asked to share a story about himself, Gawain confesses that he doesn’t have one to tell. “Yet,” murmurs the queen (Kate Dickie). As if on cue, an imposing rider (Ralph Ineson) with a booming voice and a face that looks hewed from wood appears at the entrance to the hall, wanting to play a bloody game of his own devising.

THE GREEN KNIGHT DIRECTED BY DAVID LOWERY. A24. R.