I’ve been thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves each Christmas. Dickens created his infamous cautionary tale, A Christmas Carol, Curtis gave us Keira Knightley looking ‘quite pretty’ in Love Actually, while Briggs drew up a melancholic illustration of innocence lost in The Snowman. Stories reveal what matters most in the darkness of midwinter. At a time when the sun never quite rises, we turn to our minds and our communities for illumination.

One of the earliest Christmas tales (and one of my favourite poems) is the 14th-century text, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Most recently brought to film in 2021 by David Lowery and A24 Studios, the myth of Gawain remains poignantly relevant, finding narrative consequence in our limitations and the choices that we make.

The Plot:

The poem begins on Christmas Day in the Court of Camelot. The uninvited Green Knight, having just been executed by Gawain, picks up his head and leaves, declaring that Gawain should find him in a year and a day to accept and equal blow in return…

Gawain undertakes a lengthy quest, encountering beasts, frost, hunger, and isolation. Eleven months on, with a few days remaining to meet the Knight, Gawain stays with the Lord Bertilak to rest. They agree to share with one other everything that is given to them over the next three days. Gawain fails. On the third night, seduced by Bertilak’s wife, he accepts (and keeps hidden) a girdle promised to provide spiritual protection.

On Christmas Day Gawain arrives at the Green Knight’s Chapel. As promised, Gawain offers his neck on a block. The axe falls; he flinches. Bertilak, later revealed to be the Green Knight, punishes Gawain in the chapel by nicking his neck with the axe – an ‘Achilles heel’ motif reminding Gawain of his chivalric imperfection.

The original poem offers a satisfying arc for its medieval listeners; Gawain is ultimately rewarded for his courage, returns to Camelot, and lives a long life as a respected knight. The cycle of Arthurian myth legend is permitted to continue (until it, too, must come to an end with Arthur’s death).

Against a contemporary background of the recent pandemic and climate crisis, Lowery’s film brings the environmental volatility and threat latent in the text to the fore. CGI shots of impressive and foreboding marshland, along with an isolating and tense score, capture the precarity of Gawain’s mission. In one shroom-induced vision, giants slowly reverb through the landscape. People come and go. A skull becomes a head; a fox is a friend. Nothing quite sticks, lessons are hard to learn and recall. This is a merciless world, concerned only with redistributing and rebalancing the unspoken rhythms of life and death. There are some rules from which no man is exempt.

Dev Patel’s Gawain is more flawed and unresolved than his poetic counterpart. The film extracts the confusion and unease implicit in the poem’s ending. Gawain’s celebrity, through montage, is figured as futile, egotistical, and built entirely on cowardice. Lowery also creates a correspondence between Essel, a peasant women whom Gawain loved and then scorned, and Lady Bertilak with whom he committed adultery (both Alicia Vikander). Those who are hurt and left behind karmically return to us, no matter how much time passes or people seem to forget. As the film ends, the axe remains poised above the young Gawain’s head, yet to land. Girdle now handed over, Gawain doesn’t flinch; the final words ring: “Now, off with your head”. I can think of no better image of an ego death, about relinquishing the self entirely to the other – to the void. The blunt, obstructive ending of the film only emphasises this necessary loss.

Moving from 2022 to 2023, a moment when people are cautiously coming back to life, reaffirming their own sense of security, trying to forget the knife edge they were once held at, the Gawain myth is a centuries-old reminder of our own smallness, of our own warped self-image, and, somewhat hopefully, our continued ability to choose. A deeply symbolic imagination of the epic poem with equal parts desire, death, and eerie beauty: it is the perfect film for the New Year.