What if you took a folk figure or a popular comic-book character—someone beloved enough to be the star of, say, a Disney cartoon—and made a film that cast them in a dark, even antiheroic light? Call it the “grim and gritty” take, or perhaps the “untold true story”; it’s the kind of reimagining that has befallen several storybook figures on-screen, such as Peter Pan and Hansel and Gretel. The saga of Robin Hood, the British outlaw, is particularly popular, and has been told many times over at this point. He has been a swashbuckling do-gooder from Hollywood’s Golden Age, as well as a cute animated fox. But of late, cinema has tried to cast a shadow over the man, not one of those depictions murkier than the director Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood.
This new rendition stars Hugh Jackman, who is no stranger to roughening up an established protagonist. He most famously played the X-Men character Wolverine as a fading but bloodthirsty old cowboy in Logan, the acclaimed comic-book adaptation. The Death of Robin Hood is based on the English ballad Robin Hood’s Death, a poetic, Middle English telling of the bandit’s final days. But whereas the original tale is romantic and melancholic, Sarnoski’s take has a much harder edge—so much so that I was genuinely aghast at the brutal, blunt violence of its first act. This is not a film striving to make Robin Hood a more complex figure. It first presents him starkly as an amoral villain, almost monstrous, then challenges the audience to accept that such a creature could be worthy of any redemption.
So far in his fledgling career, Sarnoski has found himself drawn to fairly downbeat narratives. His feature debut was the excellent Pig, in which he cast Nicolas Cage as a grumpy, battered hermit drawn back into the frightening subculture of the Portland food scene he’d once escaped (trust me, it makes sense in context). His big-budget follow-up was A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel to the silent horror film A Quiet Place; I found it surprisingly sensitive, elegantly setting a story of one woman’s mortality against the backdrop of the end of the world. Yet somehow, The Death of Robin Hood makes Sarnoski’s previous work look like a cheerful stroll in the park.
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The film opens by introducing Robin Hood: a bow-wielding outlaw, living atop some mountain in remote Britain, clad in animal furs; he’s sporting a shaggy mane and fulsome beard that renders him nigh-indistinguishable from a polar bear. A youngster then tries to sneak up on him, seeking revenge for a family member Robin killed long ago. Initially, the plot seems to follow the “unlikely father” arc that a lot of these realistic reboots do—after all, even Logan is about a plucky little girl bringing an aged X-Man out of his shell for one last mission.
That sweet father-daughter behavior is absent in The Death of Robin Hood, though. Robin quickly and viscerally dispatches his foe, before going up against a larger swathe of enemies who are targeting his former partner-in-banditry, Little John (Bill Skarsgård). No alliances are revived, and no sense of kinship develops; what happens is motivated by only survival and greed, with the implication being that these were always Robin Hood’s incentives—any social redistribution happened merely by accident. Sarnoski shoots everything with overwhelming but legible intensity, neither shying away from the violence nor making an effort to glorify it, and Jackman is similarly stoic in his performance. Were it not for the name and the bow and arrow, finding anything that resembles past Robin Hoods in Jackman’s interpretation would have been hard.
Just as surprising as all the nastiness is the turn that happens mid-movie. This is when the mournful balladry of the film’s source material actually comes into play: Wounded and in danger, Robin retires to a healing community run by nuns, led by the thoughtful but steely Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer); the action dissipates, never to return. The back half is not redemptive, exactly, but it’s certainly meditative, forcing the main character to sit in his misdeeds as the end of his journey draws near. I was initially thrown by this shift while watching, and expected a conclusive bit of fighting to wrap up the story, but that conclusion never arrives; Sarnoski’s intentions are much more pensive.
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Any larger Hollywood studio would have likely insisted on a grander finale, but The Death of Robin Hood, produced by A24, left me pondering the foolishness of my need for such a denouement. Instead, Sarnoski and Jackman take a name associated with heroic antics and remove that element, asking the viewer to engage with smaller, more human stakes. The gambit is daring, but it’s never uninteresting.
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