‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Review: Hugh Jackman Terrorizes Nottingham in a Ferociously Grim Character Study About How Legends Are Forged

"Pig" director Michael Sarnoski applies the historical accuracy of a Robert Eggers movie to the tale of a sociopath who's been living a lie.

It would be very easy to confuse “Pig” director Michael Sarnoski’s “The Death of Robin Hood” for a gray and gritty new take on the Prince of Thieves, but that would technically be inaccurate on all counts. For starters, this movie isn’t “gray” so much as its first act looks like it was shot directly onto volcanic ash, and “gritty” feels a bit insufficient for a medieval character study that has less in common with the glowering intensity of “The Batman” than it does the inescapable grime of Aleksei German’s “Hard to Be a God.” 

But the clearest and most important distinction to make is that there isn’t anything new about Sarnoski’s film, as its portrait of a barbaric Robin Hood stems from old English tales, some dating all the way back to the 1300s, about a murderous bandit whose virtue was twisted and redeemed by the stories that were shared between common folk in the centuries after his death. At the risk of sounding too ChatGPT about it, “The Death of Robin Hood” isn’t revisionist history — it’s a history of revisionism. One that fittingly creeps further into fiction with every claim it makes towards “the truth,” as Sarnoski’s ultra-austere effort to cut through a millennium of myths can’t help but create a hard-to-swallow fable of its own along the way. 

While all of them are ravishing to behold, some are every inch as far-fetched as a fox winning an archery tournament or Dave Chappelle becoming the sheriff of a small British city. But “The Death of Robin Hood” never betrays the barbarousness of its period, even after its titular outlaw is felled in battle at the end of the first act and forced to spend the rest of the movie tending to his wounds; it never tempers the ascetic nature of its design or the purgatorial haze of its pacing, even when the relationship between Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman) and the blood-letting prioress (Jodie Comer) who brings him back to life begins to veer into the stuff of a Middle Ages melodrama.

As a result, Sarnoski’s spare and self-serious film can’t help but resolve into an increasingly seductive thought experiment: What if the uncompromising fidelity of a Robert Eggers movie were imposed upon a historical figure whose entire life was absolute bullshit? 

Right from the jump, Sarnoski exalts in the fact that being an outlaw in 1247 A.D. wasn’t all merryness and men in tights, as his script kicks off with Robin Hood — unrecognizable from his legend under a massive and scraggly beard — murdering a tweenager who’s come for his life, the latest in a never-ending line of sons and daughters who’ve been raised to exact revenge on the brigand who killed their parents. “None were more wicked and wanton” than this Robin, who plunges a sword into the child’s head with an ease that’s been haunting him for decades. Jackman can grit his teeth with the best of them, but the canniness of his casting lives in his eyes; they burn with the inextinguishable charm of a great showman (maybe even the greatest), and while redemption seems like it won’t be on the table for the serial killer he plays here, it’s all too easy to intuit how Robin might have sold himself as a hero. 

That proves crucial in a perversely withholding film that refuses to clarify anything to do with Robin’s past. We’re made to understand that he was a very bad man, but Sarnoski reserves any of his film’s psychological insight for the present. I suppose that Robin’s misdeeds were spurred on by a self-perpetuating criminality (once you kill one innocent child you might as well have killed them all), but that assumption feels insufficient in a movie that labors to retrace his steps back towards humanity — a movie in which the question of why Robin chose to plague Nottingham in the first place remains a blank space until the bitter end. 

That being said, Robin’s past is constantly brought to bear upon his present, even if only through the fuzzy logic of a deathbed vision. To wit: The movie is only a few minutes old before Robin bumps into Little John (Bill Skarsgård), two unresolved spirits consigned to the same barren stretch of eternity. Little John, who Robin must have conscripted as a child soldier back in the day (a team-up that Robin eventually paints in a very different light), asks his old pal to kill the people who abducted his wife. It doesn’t go well. The next thing Robin knows, he’s a hobbled and broken man in the care of the kindly Sister Brigid (Comer), whose island retreat is a sanctuary for orphans, lepers, and anyone else in need of grace from a world absent mercy. “No one protects the meek,” Robin scoffs before joining their ranks — Sister Brigid would suggest that such thinking is a fanciful story in its own right.

“The Death of Robin Hood” confines itself to the priory after its first act, with Jim Ghedi’s wheezing score giving way to less suffocating tones as bolts of white sunshine and patterns of blue thread begin to pierce the impenetrable fog that Robin had been living under for so many years on the mainland. Certain reminders of violence persist (most of them contained within the film’s exquisitely thudding sound design, which lends every fired arrow and chopped hatchet the concussive force of a cannonball), but for the most part it feels like a devil wound up in heaven because of a clerical error. Sister Brigid’s tender blood-letting is the next best thing to some modern painkillers, and while Robin — aka “Randolph” — isn’t the most gracious of patients, he delights in the fact that his caretaker is wholly uninterested in whomever he might have been before he washed up on her island. 

The already dirge-like film downshifts further, towards a more pleasant state of repose, as Robin convalesces. He seems as enamored by Pat Scola’s rich and textured 35mm cinematography as we are (which alternates between sweeping wide shots of the priory and extreme close-ups of Jackman’s bulging forearms), and enjoys making himself useful to the community by hunting wild game, though never to a greater extent than the island’s rabbit population can survive. But Robin’s healing, such as it is, met with equal and opposite force by the gnawing sense that he’s responsible for all of the world’s dead and wounded, the latter of which is represented by a newly one-eyed boy named Arthur (Noah Jupe), who may not be able to see that Robin was the man who nearly blinded him. Perhaps that’s why the outlaw takes a relative shine to the priory’s resident leper (an unrecognizable Murray Bartlett), the one person whose suffering Robin knows he didn’t cause. 

“It’s never too late to find peace,” the leper tells Robin, but Sarnoski’s film — which forgoes nuanced amends in favor of quasi-religious expiation — is less interested in peace itself than in the tumult of Robin’s efforts to accommodate it. What Robin learns, and what many of his victims didn’t survive long enough to discover for themselves, is that there can be many lives within a single lifetime, not all of which are capable of co-existence. Anchored by the tenderness of Comer’s performance (the actress’ movie star glamour futilely undermined by a godforsaken pageboy cut), Sister Brigid offers herself as proof that old wounds can be tended into blooming gardens of love, and Robin is thus inspired to rewrite his own legend. 

But the cycles of violence he’s caused relay a story of their own, passed down from one generation to the next, and the hope of a new one taking its place may not be able to flower so long as Robin or Randolph still draws breath. Indeed, the richest passages of Sarnoski’s film make it feel as though Robin is being tortured by the verasimilitude of its telling, as if the lies he’s trying to seed are being violently uprooted by a truth that he still can’t escape. 

Given what we’ve come to learn about famous men who try to launder their self-interest as a form of charity, it strains belief to accept that a pretty woman and some fresh Northern Irish air might be enough to make a hardened sociopath reconsider his ways (Robin also befriends a traumatized little girl played by Faith Delaney, whose role should remain unspoiled). And yet, “The Death of Robin Hood” is ultimately saved by its tempered approach to Robin’s redemption, which this strange but lingering movie knows he will only be able to achieve in the centuries after it ends — after the grim “reality” of Robin’s legend has been refurbished into a story that people can live with. 

Grade: B

A24 will release “The Death of Robin Hood” in theaters on Friday, June 19.

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