After a year delay, The Green Knight, David Lowery (A Ghost Story) and A24’s retelling of the classic King Arthur legend, will complete its journey to theaters. An eye-popping new trailer dropped on Tuesday in advance of its July 30 release.
The Green Knight is a retelling of the poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” famously translated from Middle English by J.R.R. Tolkien in the 1920s. Based on the trailer, Lowery’s film seems to be a faithful, but creepy adaptation. The original story follows Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), the youngest member of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table and his misadventures on a quest to honor a bargain he struck with a giant treelike knight (Ralph Ineson).
In the trailer we see Gawain’s initial meeting with the Green Knight, in which the being offers him a beautiful axe. But there’s a catch: Sir Gawain will strike the giant once with the axe to keep it, but one year from that day, Gawain must meet the Green Knight at a chapel to receive one blow in return.
While the film appears to keep most of those plot details the same, Lowery has stripped way back from the gallantry and magic of the original romantic poem, in favor of a much darker and more sinister tone. Just like the original story, it seems we’ll spend most of our time following Gawain in his quest for the green chapel, during which he meets all manner of monsters, Kings, and temptations.
The Green Knight was originally scheduled for release last year — which is why there’s already a tabletop RPG version of the movie — however, distributor A24 chose to delay it during the coronavirus pandemic in hopes of giving it a larger theatrical release when more cities were open.
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