Spoiler Warning: This discussion has very few spoilers: some set up from the first act, a general idea of the narrative at hand.

"This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it."

David Lowery's The Green Knight is something I have been desperate to see since the idea was planted in my mind. In fact, David Lowery wholesale is someone I need to see more of, especially since I found his A Ghost Story to be such a complete and fulfilling indie tragedy. Nevertheless, a medieval fantasy produced by A24 and directed by a visionary like Lowery had me written all over it.

The Green Knight is beautifully strange. It offers some mind-bending narrative choices that take a lot of processing, provides a metaphor for every action within its loose two-hour runtime and stuns with some of the most violent outbursts of blood and gore. The first act was an absolute blast, with an invigorating Dev Patel performance, plenty of questions and some of the best set design of the year. The grand roundtable sequence and the visual curiosity of the Green Knight itself are enough to hook you for the next 90 minutes.

It helps tremendously that Lowery paints his film with unbelievable cinematography, painting his scenes in hues of orange, cool shades of blue and just about every tone of green in the book. It's always infatuating to look at and was a true joy to see on the big screen. The strong visual presence is matched with slick editing, including some jarring cuts that make you ponder some. The medieval costumes, landscapes and structures are designed with great care and are always impressive - particularly those crowns, which look incredible.

The narrative is where things get a little weird. It's where the film loses most of its merit, in my opinion, simply because it's so dense in the second act that the third can feel like it's happening a little too quickly. Things were always bound to get a little fantastical, and they certainly do. There's one sequence where a character's face seems to change with the light, and I truly wondered if I was beginning to crazy when I saw it because it was just subtle enough to notice but not obvious enough to think it was by design.

I found Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris and Barry Keoghan to have quite memorable smaller roles here, but the runaway star is Dev Patel, who basically carries the entire film alone. It's a killer performance, one that is unlikely to get the credit it deserves come the end of the year. Varied, simple and yet oozing with underlying meaning.

The Green Knight is another successful A24 picture. It's just so incredibly different from anything on cinema screens right now, and it's the kind of strange variety everyone needs in their life. It would probably take another few watches to firmly decipher what each prop does and what each action means. That is the beauty of art. Sometimes it's as simple, and sometimes it's The Green Knight.

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