[Fantasia 2021 Review] King Knight is a Delicious Mix of Cringe Comedy and Fairy Tales

When fans think about Richard Bates Jr., specific images probably pop immediately into their mind, whether it's the bloody dream sequences of Excision or a spider being placed in a contact case in Tone-Deaf. His films tend to blur the line between horror and comedy--particularly dark comedy--to the point that each scene is indistinguishable from the genre trappings. Moments where viewers will sit there and wonder, “...am I supposed to be laughing at this?” It’s cringe comedy at its finest. In a career of wild divergences, King Knight might be his wildest departure because it is, at its core, a charming and earnest fairy tale about chosen families that lacks the majority of his horror/genre dalliances. 

“Our story begins in the land of broken dreams, not so long ago,” a narrator intones as an animated curtain raises and an equally animated book opens to further hit home the fairytale aesthetics. Only King Knight doesn’t take place in the past or in a mythical fantasy world. It takes place in California, “for sometimes the most beautiful flowers grow in the biggest piles of shit.” 

Every rose has its thorn, they say, and the flower in this case is literally named Thorn (Matthew Gray Gubler), a High Priest who leads his modern-day coven with his life partner Willow (Angela Sarafyan). As we see a bit of their idyllic lifestyle, Thorn explains that he is a real witch and not evil. They don’t sacrifice children and the one time he tried group sex was in college and he was so anxious he couldn’t get a boner. Now, he sells bird baths online and provides support to his family of witches, including Desmond (Johnny Pemberton) and Neptune (Josh Fadem), a gay couple who are concerned the other might not be gay; Percival (Andy Milonakis) and Rowena (Kate Comer), who are dealing with Percival’s self-hate (while raising a pair of rescue kittens named Mortar and Pestle); and Angus (Nelson Franklin) and Echo (Emily Chang), who are having a problem with being socially woke enough for each other. 

But his chosen family aren’t the only ones having problems, as Thorn wants to have kids of his own but Willow doesn’t want to be pressured into it. “Sweetheart, we already have a family,” she tells him. And it’s true. They’ve created a found family of their own; a group of misfits and outsiders who have created their own familial unit filled with love and mutual understanding. Until Willow discovers that the man she’s loved isn’t quite the outsider he pretends to be. One night, she accidentally sees emails from someone from Thorn’s highschool past telling him that he has responsibilities for his upcoming high school graduation anniversary. Responsibilities that belong to a former prom king. Thorn, it turns out, was not the social outcast growing up. In fact, he was not only the prom king, but the class president and voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”

It gets worse. Thorn, it turns out, is short for Thornton. 

“You might as well be a ‘Chad’!” Willow screams through tears. 

This revelation shakes the coven to its core because it’s not so much that Thorn came from a conventional upbringing, but that he lied and built the coven on those lies. In order to find himself and come to terms with his past, Thorn must go on a walkabout of personal discovery.

King Knight is structured into a series of chapters or vignettes, each one foretold by a feminine hand laying out a tarot card representing “The Fool” or “The Hanged Man,” as if someone is telling his future. It’s a smart structure that homages the fairytale nature of the story and comes around as an important, if small, plot detail that brings everything together. The majority of Richard Bates Jr.’s narrative follows Thorn as he goes to find himself not in a magical forest, but in the parks and beaches of California. 

What makes King Knight works is that the narrative and characters act as if this revelation is an apocalyptic event that actually has stakes. This dichotomy of low stakes mixed with heightened emotions creates most of the humor as the narrative both pokes fun at the pretentiousness while embracing the earnestness of the characters. While watching King Knight, I kept thinking back to the romantic comedies of the 90s and the 00s like She’s All That or Never Been Kissed, where the main character is forced to keep a secret and the conflict arises from the secret’s discovery. Only here, it’s about a misfit who was once the most popular guy in school. 

King Knight takes the traditional romantic comedy narrative, adds a dash of Gregg Araki stoner comedy vibes and smothers it all in Bates’ brand of awkwardly cringe humor. Where a man can accidentally swig some ayahuasca, broker a conversation between a pinecone voiced by Aubrey Plaza and a rock voiced by singer Alice Glass. Where a very game Ray Wise can play the best wizard of all time. And where an earnest discussion of whether Juliette Binoche has poo in her butt can lead to epiphanies. 

The narrative may be surreal, if surprisingly conventional in structure, but the charming characters and the queer-positive focus on chosen family elevates the story. Plus you get Barbara Crampton’s scene-stealing performance as Thorn’s overbearing and prissy mother. All in all, that’s a win in my book.