While filling out the details of Gawain’s quest, Lowery follows the letter of his source surprisingly closely. Still, no-one will mistake The Green Knight for your regular medieval fantasy epic. Stirring action sequences are few: rather, this is a film of shadowy interiors, hushed tones, and unpredictable stylistic pirouettes.

The game of hunt-the-influence is hard to resist: rapid dissolves recall Scorsese, sun pours through the trees in the manner of Terrence Malick, and a talking fox could be the ancestor of the one in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

The landscape Gawain (Dev Patel) travels through is basically a psychological one – as is signalled, for instance, by having Alicia Vikander play two separate roles. At the same time, part of what Lowery evidently has in mind is a critique of the “hero’s journey” model of storytelling favoured by Hollywood.

Gawain is an uncommonly reactive, passive sort of “hero,” though thankfully Patel is anything but a remote actor: he spends much of his time channelling the likely reactions of the viewer, moving up and down a scale of bewilderment.

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Gawain is a relative outsider who must prove himself, and whose legitimacy as a knight is repeatedly put in question. This links him in an odd way to the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), an outsider in a more absolute sense: a fantastical creature resembling a walking tree trunk, whose literal colour is an explicit subject of discussion.

Over-calculated as it is, The Green Knight does have its authentically dreamlike passages. Near the heart of everything is the hero’s ambivalent, perhaps masochistic sexuality: a matter hinted at with increasing bluntness, though never quite confronted, so to speak, head on. In this too, Lowery is truer to his source material than you might guess without looking it up.