Fears of mortality both immediate—what was the source of that cough?—and more wide-ranging—what happens after we die?—have lately taken nagging root in my mind, distracting me as I go about the regular things of life.
It’s a poetic kind of confrontation, one addressing our particular worries and the haunt of human history, the many centuries our sorry lot has spent living fleeting lives and then, just like that, ceasing to be.
And there was A Ghost Story, a beguiling rumination on death and memory that is in deep conversation with The Green Knight.
The Green Knight has far more of a plot than A Ghost Story does, a quest narrative that takes Gawain to the dangers of the world outside.
On a blustery Christmas Day, Gawain accepts the challenge laid down by the hulking knight of the title, a tree-creature sort of being who strides into King Arthur’s court suggesting a game.
It is a metaphor for all of us, our grasping for meaning as we stumble toward the only certainty that exists.
Lowery adeptly balances the gritty, if wholly imagined, reality with the film’s supernatural swirl, somehow making manifest the very concept of myth, grounded in human experience but convinced of its connection to the otherworldly.
He has an intimate rapport with Alicia Vikander, in a pair of roles, and with Joel Edgerton, who turns up as the shifty lord of a remote manor with a game proposal of his own.
It’s an elusive film, in its plotting and allusions, but is still potent and immediate, as resonant as any of our own late-night quests toward the far reaches of our self-conception.
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