David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations

Equal parts folk, prog rock and metal, The Green Knight takes place at the inflection point when one version of the old world was supplanted by the next. In David Lowery’s liberty-taking interpretation of the character’s 14th-century origin poem, the headstrong yet not-quite-valiant Sir Gawain (Dev Patel, superb) traverses an England caught between the mystical pagan religions and the nascent Christianity soon to change the face of the nation.

At first, subtler touches denote the friction between the two, as in the cross-cutting juxtaposition of a supernatural blood-and-bone ritual against the quasi-biblical imagery of an ageing Arthur’s court. (The king’s crown doesn’t take the shape of a golden disc framing his head for nothing.) By the time near the third act that Lowery reveals his key reference point to be Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, another mounting of myth invested in mortal frailty and unconcerned with textual fidelity, it’s apparent that the maturation of one man is meant to coincide with that of an entire society.