Suddenly shorn of flesh, Gawain’s abrupt bones lie beneath a pine, his skeleton bleached against the forest’s green, emptied skull slumping limply from shoulders.
Exploring space and expanding time, the lens slowly revolves, luxuriating in the dense woodland, silvered sun through emerald leaf, birdsong and fog, before completing its round back to Gawain. Averted with pity and shame, or maybe rather with apathy or cruelty, our gaze turns away to admire the forest’s inhuman beauty. Moments later, Gawain, the hero of David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021), is also abandoned by the camera’s indifferent eye, which swivels from the knight’s battered body.
Or, at least, he appears to die: of exposure, of wind or cold, of hunger or thirst, perhaps too a wound he is ambushed, bound, abandoned in a Welsh forest by a hostile assemblage of bandits and brigands.
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