The Green Knight, Joel Edgerton’s latest makes you think

Joel Edgerton in a scene from The Green Knight

The Green Knight (M)
Amazon Prime
★★★

For a bloke born in Blacktown, in western Sydney, Joel Edgerton has spent a lot of time in Arthurian and Henriad England. On stage for Bell Shakespeare in the late 1990s, he was Prince Hal and then Henry V in Shakespeare’s history plays.

When a decade later David Michod filmed the Henry plays as The King, Edgerton was the rotund knight John Falstaff. Five years before that, in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur, he was the king’s nephew Gawain.

I mention this because the Australian actor’s performance is one of the highlights of the hard-to-pin-down fantasy adventure The Green Knight, written and directed by American filmmaker David Lowery.

This time around, Edgerton is not Gawain, the central character. That job goes to the Oscar-nominated English actor Dev Patel, and he fits the role well. He’s a bit like Prince Hal before he becomes king: a handsome, callow royal who is loose with booze and brothels.

This changes when the titular Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), who looks like a humanoid tree, turns up at the palace one Christmas. Wielding a huge axe, he challenges the assembled knights to a game.

The game is a one-on-one fight and the catch – which Gawain should think about more than he does – is that whatever blow is laid on the Green Knight will be laid on his opponent in one year’s time.

He agrees to the fight, is armed with – no less than Excalibur – and wins, sort of. “Was it not just a game?” he asks his uncle afterwards. “Perhaps,’’ replies King Arthur (Sean Harris), “but it is not complete.”

To make it complete, Gawain must find the Green Knight and take from him what he delivered. Spoiler alert: that means decapitation.

“I like your head where it is,’’ says his prostitute girlfriend Essel (Oscar nominee Alicia Vikander). “This is how silly men perish.” That’s well put. From here the film is a journey, as Gawain goes to find the Green Knight and accept – or reject – his fate. He meets lots of strange people on the way, along with a fox, who becomes important.

I have not read the anonymous 14th-century poem that is the loose basis for this movie. The work of literature that does come to mind is Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, full of odd characters who pop up and cause trouble.

Edgerton is an enigmatic unnamed lord who likes to ride horses, hunt and … I will not reveal what he does to Gawain, but it’s worth waiting for. “The world is fit for all manner of mysteries,’’ he tells Gawain. You bet it is.

The other stranger on the road who takes this unusual movie to an even more unusual place is an unnamed scavenger (Irish actor Barry Keoghan, so good in Dunkirk and The Killing of a Sacred Deer). He starts out like the porter in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but we soon realise this is not a comic scene.

This is a slow-moving movie (125-minutes) that will make you think, during and after. By the end I was comparing it with the work of Danish director Lars von Trier, which might or might not be a compliment.

-

Ron’s Gone Wrong (PG)
In cinemas
★★★½

“It’s Mad Max meets Sesame Street … live streaming.”

“If our share price goes any higher it’ll need a space suit.

“How can you have fun offline? It’s against nature.”

Such are the thoughts of a sneaky senior executive at tech giant Bubble in the whip-smart animated movie Ron’s Gone Wrong.

Bubble has launched a robot friend that every kid wants. The B-bot is the ultimate in personalised artificial intelligence. It follows its child owner around like a loyal dog, forbidden from moving more than six feet away, uploading and downloading everything she or he needs.

“It’s getting to know you, everything about you,’’ says that sneaky executive (voiced by Rob Delaney).

It looks a bit like R2D2 and, as the kids can choose any “skin” for their “best friend in a box”, there’s an amusing moment when a riot of R2D2s race across the road, following their masters to school.

The timing of this movie, the debut feature of London-based animation studio Locksmith Animation, could not be better. Its release coincides with news that Facebook will rebrand and adopt a new name as it expands its virtual reality “metaverse”.

On one level, this is almost a horror movie. It envisages a world where any kids who are not locked onto a screen that never leaves their sides are losers.

There’s a moment where one kid breaks into Bubble Corp’s “cloud”. It’s exactly what I think the cloud might look like and it’s scary. That kid is Barney Pudowski (Jack Dylan Grazer) and he is a loser because he does not have a B-bot, which automatically means he does not have any human friends.

His father runs a novelty export business (a pooping unicorn doll does well, but times are tough in general), his mother is dead and his paternal grandmother keeps goats and chooks at their home somewhere in suburban America.

This 107-minute movie is directed by Sarah Smith and Jean-Philippe Vine. The script is by Smith and Welsh writer Peter Baynham, who was Oscar-nominated, along with Sacha Baron Cohen, for writing the latest Borat film.

In this film, we learn the Pudowskis hail from Bulgaria and, as in Borat, fun is poked at people from another place. Grandma is a DYI expert. “I fixed my hernia with a bread knife and vodka,’’ she tells her 21st-century grandson.

Barney’s life changes when he receives a B-bot, the last kid in school to do so. The difference is, it’s one that literally fell off the back of a truck so it doesn’t work as it should.

Barney is disappointed with Ron (a name chosen from his bar code) and wants to take him back. He changes his mind when Ron, whose safety features have not been downloaded, deals with some local bullies.

It’s an extension of this AI autonomy that leads to the “Mad Max and Sesame Street” line, and the sneaky boss doesn’t care what’s happening as long as it’s trending and the share price is rising.

From here we have a story of an outsider boy learning from a misfit robot and vice-versa, as the Bubble Corp tries to track them down and separate them. It’s a timely, funny exploration of a theme – the love-hate affair between humans and AI – that has occupied the artistic mind for a while now, in films such as Spike Jonze’s Her and Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel Klara and the Sun, to take just two recent examples.

Ron (voiced by Zack Galifianakis) and Barney (voiced by Jack Dylan Grazer) in scene from Ron's Gone Wrong

-

Antlers (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★

Antlers is a three-star supernatural horror film with a five-star performance by 15-year-old American actor Jeremy T. Thomas.

Thomas is Lucas Weaver, a silent, wary 12-year-old at middle school in small town Oregon. He likes to draw, which his teacher (Keri Russell from The Americans) encourages, until she sees the drawings.

When Lucas passes a skunk on the walk home from school, he picks up a large rock. Once home, with the smashed skunk, it looks like he lives alone, until we see a doubly locked door and hear noises, not human, coming from the room behind it.

This is a door that should not be opened. As this is a horror movie, directed and co-written by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass), there’s a fair chance it will be.

When half-eaten bodies are found in the woods, the sheriff (Jesse Plemons), thinks the perpetrator is “probably a bear or a cougar”. That holds until the coroner finds human teeth marks on the remains.

The sheriff and the teacher are siblings and they are still living with their own childhood terrors. The sheriff pops pills. The teacher has a drinking problem.

Plemons and Russell are fine actors but it is Taylor who makes this 99-minute movie worth watching. He is a scared boy who might also be scary.

A scene where he is asked to read his mythical story – which we see he has drawn, not written – to the class is spellbinding. The young actor brings emotional nuance to a boy no-one is sure whether to help or fear.

The relevance of the title, Antlers, lies behind that locked door. “The f..king place smells like death,’’ says a cop who visits the house, and he’s not wrong.

When writing about horror movies, it’s almost mandatory to note the jump scares, regardless of whether one jumps or not. Well, this movie has one that literally made me leave my seat, which doesn’t happen very often.

There are some interesting ideas here – as well as the nightmare childhoods, there’s a mining/environment/indigenous peoples theme – but it becomes a bit unbelievable and predictable towards the end. Here’s a tip for anyone who enters an unknown house and sees blood spattered on the walls: turn around and leave.

Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, and Jeremy T. Thomas in Antlers (2021)