David Lowery’s The Green Knight is a sombre, stylised dark fantasy, adapting the popular Arthurian legend with a keen eye on aesthetics. While very attractive to watch, and anchored by a strong lead performance by Dev Patel, Lowery’s near-trademark sense of self-importance and false gravitas limits its ultimate appeal. It is a largely decent film, but I swear it struts around as if it is a masterpiece.

Gawain (Patel) lives in the court of King Arthur (Sean Harris) in Camelot. One Christmas the court is visited by a strange and magical Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), who challenges anyone in the chamber to strike a blow and win his axe. In one year, however, that victor must travel to the distant Green Chapel and receive an equal blow in return. Gawain volunteers, seeking the glory that will confer on him a knighthood, and enraged by the Green Knight’s odd passivity, delivers a fatal beheading. The Knight, however, does not die, and merely collects his own head and leaves – warning that Gawain must come and receive the same strike in one year’s time.

A traditional quest narrative ensures The Green Knight becomes what is ultimately a road movie, with Gawain encountering a series of individuals on his way to the Green Chapel. Some are mundane, like an encounter with a group of young thieves. Some are utterly fantastical, including a group of ominous giants and a supernatural fox. It is all splendidly captured by cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, with an epic scale and unsettling look that represents a huge leap from earlier work like You’re Next (2011) and The True Adventures of Wolfboy (2019). Regular Lowery composer Daniel Hart contributes an excellent, evocative musical score.

Dev Patel delivers an earnest, flawed character in Gawain, that has an emotional realism quite distinct from the film’s other more stylised performances. There is a strong cast assembled here, including a small reunion of sorts for The King (2019) co-stars Sean Harris and Joel Edgerton. As the titular Green Knight, Ralph Ineson is superb, delivering the fantastical wooden soldier from underneath physical prosthetics rather than computer-generated trickery. It is a wonderful, striking turn that ensures a memorable and oddly charming antagonist.

Despite those enormous merits in production and performance, there is an inescapable sense of pretension about Lowery’s film. It reeks of profundity without delivering any genuine insight. It is scattered throughout with stunning visual moments but operates at a slow, excessively grand pace. Most egregiously of all it does not so much fail at the third act as steal one wholesale from another, significantly more accomplished film. That lack of creativity does a lot of damage to the film precisely when it needs creativity and insight the most.

In its best moments The Green Knight is visually splendid, and wonderfully atmospheric. Beneath the surface there is an unwanted combination of superficiality and smug self-satisfaction. The combination is a film that is easy on the eye, enjoyable to watch, but ultimately difficult to recommend with too much enthusiasm.