THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD
2026
Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski
The Death of Robin Hood would have it—or at least star and executive producer Hugh Jackman would have it, as he's explained it thus in a whole trailer for his film, so it must be a sentiment shared by its writer and director Michael Sarnoski—that it is closer to the source of its legend than usual, and there's truth there. The medieval ballads of Robin Hood are exceedingly violent; Robin himself is a bit of an asshole even to his companions, and the older the ballads get the less likely we are to find our hero robbing from the rich to give to the poor, than robbing from the church to give to himself. And so, within its first five minutes, The Death has established Robin as a brutal, avaricious survivor, which does align with those old ballads; it has established also that Robin is irreligious, that Robin will kill women if it's expeditious, and that Robin is a psychologically-realist figure capable of feeling depression, guilt, and regret, which aligns... less. Given the explicit source is "Robin Hood's Death," which concludes with Robin forbidding vengeance on the woman who murdered him, that middle one is clearly no mistake. (That Robin is irreligious just means either that a filmmaker in 2026 didn't want to deal with an anticlerical but nonetheless devout Catholicism, or that he could not comprehend how this Robin could believe in God.) And it's cosmetic (or is it?), but Robin does not wear green. In fact, this is easily the least-green Robin Hood of all time—with very little sarcasm, including the 1922 one—answering the question I previously asked rhetorically about what happens to Robin in the winter, and The Death subjects you to the sheer wrongness of a "Robin Hood" wandering through the yellow and brown and gray barrenness (this adaptation was filmed in Northern Ireland, in February and March), with the very occasional patch of lichen or evergreen tree for contrast against ostensibly English mountains that tower over Robin as he walks through an empty, iron-skied desolation that we can only be sure has been visited by men before by the evidence of the long-forgotten Neolithic henge stones he passes.
It may be appropriate to wonder how much this Robin Hood is even sufficiently identifiable to justify its own title; I had wondered that before I saw it, and I still wonder a bit, now that I have. There is a constant sense throughout the first half of the film that it's not very interested in "Robin Hood" except because of the very recognizability of the name, and would otherwise be equally happy with a non-folkloric character it made up itself to tell a tale about a full-on warrior in the wasteland, not even really a barbarian in barbarian times. (I'm not sure "England" as a concept is referenced, while English government is referred to so extremely glancingly it's something that might have only existed in an earlier period, in the form of a sheriff whose throat Robin slit. At all other turns it exists solely through the implication that to be "outlawed" requires one to acknowledge there is "a law" in the first place.)
So we can just say it, right? I mean, I'm going to: Sarnoski is very consciously "doing an Eggers" here, but Robert Eggers, though obviously just as interested in the medieval grotesque, would be a little more interested in "Anno Domini 1257" as a real time, and he wouldn't have been so keen to suggest Robin is meant to be a octogenarian, though in fairness this is that rare breed of Robin Hood that does not posit any kind of importance to the 1190s or the Plantagenet family. But there's a presentist superiority to the straw-Robin that Sarnoski's built that wouldn't and couldn't be salient in, say, The Northman. Anyway: I'd stake that not a single damn thing about The Death positively demands to be "about Robin Hood" until that first half has elapsed—which, incidentally, would be a fair amount of time after this "Robin Hood's Death" has already arrived at his fated destination of Kirklees Priory, that, itself, has been dramatically reimagined as an imposing monastery on an island*—whereupon Robin has a conversation with an old foe, this marking about the first time it's drawing anything significant from the legendarium besides "this bastard is friends with another bastard."
I'll confess I kind of find this reinterpretation objectionable: I don't know, but making a movie whose basic concept is "hey, pinko, what if I told you the communist thief of Sherwood was actually just another bandit and a wanton beast? what if we have him and Little John murder some fucking peasant on the roadside for a loaf of bread? would you still think he was a righteous dude?" feels like an exercise in iconoclastic miserablism at best, and reactionary at worst. It is, naturally, somewhat more complicated than that (maybe not an enormous amount: it is also "what if Robin Hood were Logan?" in a fairly overt manner, and likewise Unforgiven et al, in a more general sense), but it inevitably comes off pretty tryhard in its grimdark edginess. It would probably seem a little pushy, even if the action it's already gotten up to by the end of its first act weren't so cartoonishly over-the-top, in its indulgence in gleeful nastiness, that I'd be lying to say if I didn't come very close to audibly laughing at it in the context of a Robin Hood, even though it's equally plausible I was supposed to be horrified.
So there is some measure of plot here, because "Robin Hood's Death" obviously doesn't have enough material for a feature-length narrative, though The Death gets much closer to making it the sole basis than its previous adaptation, Robin and Marian (these being films on the same subject that wind up pretty damn different: we can possibly also file it under "tryhard" that one of the very first things Robin does here is deny that "Maid Marian" ever existed; meanwhile, the fundamental distinctions between Sean Connery's old Robin and Jackman's old Robin lie in how the former remained heroic in a battered way, and his problem was he was a vainglorious and narcissistic dipshit, whereas the latter is a much more thoroughgoing wreck of a human being, in our contemporary fashion for dismalness). Still, even with this one's A24-branded, slow(er) cinema approach, a movie's gotta have something, and thus we're introduced to Robin as a mountainside hermit, willing only to discuss the outlaw in the third person, for the good reason that he's a widely-reviled murderer, and his present interlocutor (Jade Croot) has been searching these highlands in an effort to assassinate him to satisfy a blood debt, which she attempts despite his hospitality to the traveler. Robin gives her some pointless advice, and measured praise, whilst he ends her life. Sometime thereafter, he is approached by his old comrade Little John (Bill Skarsgard), who has stolen an entirely new name ("Edward") and refashioned himself as a yeoman farmer, but whose crime has caught up with him so that he's been driven off by his victim's family, while his own family has been quasi-enslaved. Reluctantly, Robin agrees to help, and the upshot is numerous corpses, Robin grievously wounded, and Robin the only remaining person on Earth that John's young child Margaret (Faith Delaney) either trusts or even knows, separately bringing them to the island of the mystical healer Brigid (Jodie Comer). Robin, cannily, has arrived under a pseudonym ("Rudolph," or "Fame Wolf" in archaic German, which I'd take to be intentional), which is wise because amongst the apparently infinite people Robin has wronged throughout his life is this selfsame prioress, Brigid.
What I probably haven't made terribly clear is that I think The Death of Robin Hood is good, though praise is going to continue to be ribboned with complaining. "Doing an Eggers," I said, but it is certainly just as much a Sarnoski film, and Sarnoski's directorial career to date has been dedicated almost exclusively to movies about, basically, how violence cannot fill an empty soul, and you can tell it's a favored theme even if all we're really talking about is just two movies, 2021's Pig and this one. A Sarnoski film is also, to be charitable, bound to be hard to sell; to be less charitable, they're intentionally made to be sold under misleading pretenses, with his earlier film being almost verbatim marketed as "John Wick, but with a pig" but even leaving its marketing aside still asking, as a film, for you to approach it as "Mandy, but with a pig," concerning, as it did, a rural Nicolas Cage on a vengeance trip. And The Death feels more deliberate still as far as that goes, even if the primary vengeance being pursued is now against our protagonists, invoking the kind of all-encompassing generational blood feuding that is likely more a creation of latterday medievalism than how medieval people actually conceived justice, with various individuals determining whether they can or should kill Robin, and Robin, exhausted with his own infamy, determining whether he should just let them, his increasingly-explicit deathwish complicated by his new responsibilities to his friend's daughter.
We can at least give it this much, this set-up does not by any means slide frictionlessly into the escort mission plot you'd think it would, though maybe conventionality didn't need to be so thoroughly scorned: as far as I can tell, it really is Sarnoski's earnest wish that you didn't like violence, but he has learned, since Pig, that you do anyway, no matter how many movies might scold you about it while delivering what you crave, so with some cleverness, Sarnoski goes right ahead and feeds it to you right away, the first thirty minutes of Robin Hood essentially being entirely action, or suspenseful lead-ups towards action. It is some excessively bloody action, too, and very well-staged bloody action at that: Sarnoski is showing that he really can walk the walk, and comprehends the visceral thrill of the ugly barbarism he's conjured, splitting the difference well between the atavistic desperation of his subjects and some hugely intentional and severe camera direction, and while I only know cinematographer Pat Scola from Pig (which I frankly do not think looks all that good, in its basic underlitten 2020s-ness), I feel fairly safe in assuming that Robin's struggle against the backlighting blaze of John's farmhouse represents, collectively, the best images of his career, and to wedge it in here somewhere The Death is front-to-back gorgeous even when it's not doing exceedingly well-judged firelit night, though that and misty wintry mornings are where it excels the most. Anyway, as previously suggested, I hope Sarnoski has purposefully left open the possibility that you will even find that action faintly ridiculous, in how amped-up its gore and bodily mortification get, and in its insistence that no class of person is safe from the savagery of Robin Hood's enemies, or from the savagery Robin Hood himself. Either way, he's got his bases covered: whether it's meant to work the way it looks, by overwhelming you with moral horror, or if it's meant to work the way it actually did for me, by giving the action junkie a big free hit right at the outset (with images that could be and were used in the marketing**), the strategy seems to be to make you sit with the feeling of emptiness that the aftermath occasions for a remaining hour and a half, where, kind of, nothing of consequence occurs. It's a way to get at the idea of violence being unsatisfying, I suppose, by refusing to satisfy you with violence.
Now, it's obviously not entirely true that "nothing happens," but one thing that doesn't happen is that anyone ever shows up to Kirkless/St. Clement to motivate a conventional third act, and, you know, I'm willing to be enough of a mouthbreather about it to at least mutter under my breath that that sort of sucks, given that I, personally, had really enjoyed seeing what Sarnoski was capable of doing with medieval ultraviolence (for what it's worth, Eggers's movies have to date always had their big finales, just saying); but I also can't say it doesn't work for his movie, which maintains an incipient violence even after the giant pyrotechnics are long gone, thanks in part to, well, being an adaptation of "Robin Hood's Death," and being titled The Death of Robin Hood, and placing Robin under the potentially-untender mercies of the Prioress of Kirklees, whatever this movie has chosen to call her. (Though do not let me give you the impression that it's not kind of annoying in the details of how Sarnoski wheels around towards his endgame here: our outlaw just blurts the fuck out he's Robin Hood, rather than having this arise through even slightly more interesting means—I'm legitimately not sure I'd be exaggerating to say this 125 minute movie with no plot lets its guilt-rotten hero stew in this new, even more special form of guilt for a total of 125 seconds before he barfs up his secret—and all the more remarkably, the way the story's structured, he's just made a deathbed promise to his now-leprous old enemy Guy of Gisbourne (Murray Bartlett) to not tell Brigid, because Guy has forgiven Robin and doesn't want him to die, sure, but probably also doesn't want his beloved healer to have to decide whether or not to kill him.)
But even if I find myself wondering about how it'll rewatch, I'd expect a lot more of the last three-quarters of the film remains compelling because of Jackman, who is pretty magnificent. (He has also furthered Australia's strong representation amongst film Robin Hoods; insert "descendants of transportees" joke here.***) Now, he has the assistance of a strong supporting cast: Skarsgard afforded the dumber friend, and accordingly the less-troubled version of Robin's own guilt, young Delaney not getting in the way and giving Robin something to not be hostile towards, and even Comer—who has, in my experience, often gotten herself cast in dubious roles and then fruitlessly trying to technique her way out of them—being quite good with a good role, as she wonders if she can or should dredge her ancient hatred back up. And this whole cast is doing some interesting stuff with dialect: it's not Middle English, albeit with some gestures towards archaism, but there is a neat 15th-16th century "Southern accent" Early Modern English feel that's probably reasonably accurate to that period, but because we hear such an English accent so rarely in movies it feels like it's placing this period piece defiantly out of time. (Also of great assistance to the movie, given its grim meditative quietness, is Jim Ghedi's very-present folk score, which sounds more "Celtic" to my untrained ear but whatever, as the whole movie feels "more Celtic" than seems quite correct; but it is, anyway, work that I would even describe as "totalizing," because it starts out that way, including several lyric songs that may or may not be reciting Robin Hood ballads—it would help if I could remotely understand what the fuck he was saying—except it doesn't stay totalizing, and it's slightly jarring, once you realize the ballads stopped thirty minutes earlier, and ain't coming back.)
But yes, it's Jackman's movie above all, not ever playing down his Robin's abhorrence, and nonetheless drawing you in because he clearly shares that abhorrence towards himself (sometimes in ways the screenplay is too keen to state aloud, though it only hits "pretentious and condescending" in a tedious dialogue about the power of storytelling to inspire humanity but also to warp history, that anyone who's been paying attention will have gotten is what the movie is "about," certainly no later than a final scene that is thankfully much more artful about it); and I kind of don't know what other actor working today could have played this Robin, which banks heavily on the history we have with Jackman as an effortless (if self-loathing) badass, whom we are invited to believe must have some fundamental, even ineradicable gentleness to him, despite every time we see his weathered face we can perceive in his eyes the lifetime he's spent trying to kill that part of himself.
I was probably never going to outright love this Robin Hood, given its (ahem) priors, and its manipulation of a legend to get at notions that I don't really see the point of being associated with this legend; I would daresay this is never going to be anyone's "favorite" Robin Hood. But it is worthwhile taken as it is, managing to be fascinating and thorny right up till the end: if Sarnoski has figured out how to punish his audience and not give them what they want, more as a matter of structure than just being a moralizing dick about what "real violence" entails for a guy who never existed, I can spot him that, considering it is, after all, about the hardest circles to square in cinema.
Score: 7/10
*Also apparently renamed "St. Clement," or Wikipedia says so, though I didn't catch this while watching. Clement of Alexandria—who was a saint in 1257, but was later removed—suspected the pagan gods were but deified men, which would be germane to this film. (Though it could be named after nothing but the vibes of the word "Clement.")
**Not that it worked very well, The Death unfortunately being a bit of a flop.
***I bring this trivia up only because, before our journey through the cinematic history of Robin Hood comes to a close, I wished to acknowledge the irony that Robin has been played by an Englishman in a major live-action film adaptation precisely once. That Englishman was Cary Elwes, and that adaptation was Robin Hood: Men In Tights. (Though for the record, the cartoon fox was English.)
Reviews in this series:
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Curtiz & Keighley, 1938)
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (Levin & Sherman, 1946)
The Son of Robin Hood (Sherman, 1956)
Robin and Marian (Lester, 1976)
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Reynolds, 1991)
Robin Hood: Men In Tights (Brooks, 1993)
Robin Hood (Scott, 2010)
Robin Hood (Bathurst, 2018)
The Death of Robin Hood (Sarnoski, 2026)
plus!
Robin Hood (Dwan, 1922)
Robin Hood (Reitherman, 1973)
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