A24 has released a trailer for David Lowery’s upcoming medieval fantasy adventure, The Green Knight. Over the past ten years, Lowery has arguably evolved into one of the more fascinating, if still lesser-known, writer-directors active today. He’s quickly amassed an eclectic filmography composed of crime movies, supernatural dramas, and even a Disney live-action remake, all of which have earned varying degrees of critical acclaim. For his new film, Lowery will continue to mix things up by adapting the famous 14th century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

In this version of the Arthurian legend, Dev Patel stars as Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s reckless newphew and a Knight of the Round Table who sets out to confront the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), a “gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men”. Interestingly, the film will open just a few weeks after another Patel-led literary re-telling, The Personal History of David Copperfield, makes it way across the pond (it hit the UK back in January). With its release date just a few months away, A24 is kicking off the movie’s marketing this week.

The first trailer for The Green Knight dropped online this morning, following on the heels of yesterday’s teaser poster unveiling. You can check out both the trailer and poster in the space below.

Tonally, The Green Knight teaser strikes a dark and ominous tone reminiscent of something like Robert Eggers’ folklore horror movie The Witch (a film that, appropriately, also costarred Ineson and Katie Dickie, who plays the Queen to Sean Harris’ King Arthur here). The footage is chock-full of dreamlike visuals conjured up by Lowery and his A Ghost Story cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, be it the image of an all too convincing puppet show or the glimpses of the towering and nightmarish Green Knight himself. Lowery has long demonstrated a mastery when it come to commanding the mood of his movies (inviting comparisons to storytellers like Terence Malick), and appears to have an equally firm grasp on the feeling he’s going for in The Green Knight. Of course, it helps to have a terrific cast like the one he’s assembled for this film, including Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander as, respectively, a lord and woman with magical(?) abilities who Gawain encounters on his quest.

A24 has positioned The Green Knight to serve as counter-programming to this summer’s big-budget tentpoles, much like its Ari Aster horror film, Midsommar, did last year. The movie will open a week after Fast & Furious 9 and face-off against Disney and Kenneth Branagh’s Artemis Fowl in its opening weekend, but there’s not a whole lot of overlap between those films (as far as their target audiences go). Lowery, as mentioned earlier, hasn’t seen a whole lot of box office success so far, but that could change with The Green Knight, a movie that has the makings of his most accessible arthouse offering to date. Failing that, it’s just great to know we’re getting two promising - not to mention, very different - Dev Patel period dramas within the space of a single month.

Source: A24

  • The Green Knight Release Date: 2021-07-30