The Green Knight (2021) review

Around Christmas time - according to this version of the Arthurian tale - a tree-shaped man (or is it a man-shaped tree?) called The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) approaches the fabled Round Table and proposes a "game" in which one of the men strikes him with an axe - Gawain (Dev Patel) accepts the challenge and chops off his noggin', and then in a year he's instructed to seek out the Greek Knight so he can also get beheaded (yay, fun).  This should be looked at as a stylistic exercise only - Lowery gussies up the very old story with gothic touches, a synth-powered soundtrack, filters galore and unimaginative video game-esque plotting, as Gawain encounters various people along the way and obtains items: first it's The Scavenger (Barry Keoghan) who robs him, then it's Winifred (Erin Kellyman) who's lost her head, then he acquires an axe, meets (and befriends?) a fox, encounters female giants, is "handed" a magical belt (that gets coated with semen) and finally has a confrontation with "the final boss."  What any of this is supposed to amount to is a mystery to me (Lowery is betting on the audience filling in the blanks), and I'd rather have seen an adaptation of Pinecone's "Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight" that he wrote as a teenager.