When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. 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. Your skin, your bones. Your virtue.
A dark fantasy adventure film adapting the Middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most famous Medieval one-off tales of King Arthur’s court.
It’s quite surreal1 and I liked it. It has some immaculate vibes and definitely discusses honor and death in ways that might inspire players and GMs. While it certainly has its own interpretations in dialogue with the text, it’s rare to see such a deep and caring take on the old stories like this. Arthurian literature in particular has a lot of movie adaptions which have been panned - so it’s good to see such a strong vision.
Footnotes
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More so than Macbeth (2015), which is artsy but pretty grounded, and even more so than The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) which is a step above the 2015 version in how high-concept it is.
I mention those mostly because I also liked both and I’m not going to have another spot to discuss these great references for the game which aren’t really direct sources - and the comparison is amusing.
But anyway, The Green Knight goes a few steps further in being artistic to the point of obscurity - but not so far as I’ve heard some people claim. It’s hardly an “acid trip” style movie - the plot and characters are always fairly straightforward - it’s just poetic dialogue and a loose and surreal setting. ↩