The Death of Robin Hood is a painterly film, but a melancholy rather than a merry one. A key descriptor in the rhymes and ballads, “merry” meant “many”, in any case, not cheerful. Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, and the Sheriff of Nottingham do not appear in this telling, nor do men in tights and feathers in their caps. In lieu of Sherwood Forest, there’s a dreary wood where Robin (Hugh Jackman) shows a little girl, Margaret (Faith Delaney), how to use a bow and a meagre orchard that an ailing leper (Murray Bartlett) bids Robin to tend in his absence.
A welcome revisionist take on the myth of the English folk hero, Michael Sarnoski’s film deconstructs and then reconstructs it. A sixtyish fugitive with silvery Hagrid hair and a lone wanderer in Cumbria’s fells, this Robin is no socialistic ex-nobleman but a lifelong cold-blooded thug who is beginning to regret his homicidal career. He suggests as much to the young woman (Jade Croot) – a hungry pauper he tosses a meat bone to at his hillside fire – who had bought into his legendary heroism, then kills her in self-defence.
Tracked down by Little John (Bill Skarsgård), Robin joins him in a guerrilla attack on the holding seized by a family from John (along with his wife and child) that he had unashamedly seized from one of its kinsmen. The squalid nocturnal fight mangles Robin and elicits John’s atavistic brutality. A horrific image of a dead boy running, pierced by an arrow, indicates that Sarnoski’s film is anti-violence, unlike, say, the hyperbolically graphic movies made by Robert Eggers.
Anyone expecting a higher body count will be disappointed. The carnage in The Death of Robin Hood is frontloaded, the second act depicting Robin’s late-in-life education in protectiveness and caring. The film’s repudiation of murder and maiming, a stance eventually embodied in Robin, as it was in Gregory Peck’s reformed outlaw in The Gunfighter (1950), must have denied the expectations of action movie fans, probably explaining its box-office failure in the US.
The transition from Hollywood-ish havoc to art-house style inner-reflection is marked by a rough sea journey. The hallucinating Robin is ferried to an island where a priory sits atop a cliff, like the edifice in Alexander Naysmyth’s 1816 “A View of Tantallon Castle with the Bass Rock” (in the Firth of Forth). He has been crippled and is close to death but the water crossed only intimates the Styx. The priory where, using an alias, he’s received by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a wise philosopher nun, is his last-chance saloon.
The widowed Brigid and her few helpers tend the sick and take care of orphans. Her antecedents are the Abbess of Kirklees who, in A Gest of Robyn Hode (c.1500), bleeds the aged outlaw, her cousin, to death, and the cloistered Marian (Audrey Hepburn), who mercifully poisons herself and the fatally wounded Robin (Sean Connery) in Robin and Marian (1976). The Death of Robin Hood is the closest analogue to Richard Lester’s elegiac film, though Sarnoski necessarily avoids nostalgia (and humour, too).
Brigid bleeds Robin to restore his health and, ignorant of his true identity but sensing he seeks redemption for his crimes – which he hasn’t acknowledged – gently ministers to his mind. The tension between them is rendered ambiguously and delicately played by Comer and Jackman, his Robin a grim pragmatist who finds himself ambushed by tenderness.
He learns lessons from others at the priory and himself teaches a newcomer. The leper keeps a raven, a symbol of transformation and death: his relationship with Robin echoes that between Death and the Knight in The Seventh Seal (1957). His recognition of Robin isn’t reciprocated because face bandages mask him, yet Robin sees him as an equal and kindred spirit.
The leper orders Robin not to harm anyone at the priory and offers him a means of finding peace by following the example of the Roman philosopher Boethius, who reacted with stoic calm to imprisonment and torture by the early medieval Ostrogothic king Theodoric. He also tells Robin to look after the traumatised Margaret after she rrives at the priory. Robin has no choice. The girl knows and trusts Robin and demands fatherliness from him; they and Brigid form a surrogate family. When a vengeful survivor (Noah Jupe) from tne farm family shows up, Robin tasks himself with delivering the youth from evil in a sea and beach sequence limned with foreboding.
As he intimates in the opening sequence, Robin has grown to despise the heroic myth that had grown up around him. Eventually, for the sake of someone else’s peace of mind, he is obliged to embrace and gild it. So Robin Hood the rascal, trickster, subduer of oppressors and benefactor of the poor, the Robin of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Richard Greene, Michael Praed, and, alas, Kevin Costner, supplants the “murderous brigand” whom Jackman’s Robin speaks of in the third person to the pauper woman. The Death of Robin Hood embodies the dramatic maxim behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.
Working with Pat Scola, who was also the cinematographer on Sarnoski's previous features Pig (2021) and A Quiet Place: Day One (2024), the director brings a muted lyricism to The Death of Robin Hood. Scola makes potent use of long shots, skewed angles, and rack-focusing for two-shots, especially when Robin and Brigid are talking. A sudden tracking shot alongside the orchard-cum-cemetery as Robin and the Leper walk there conflates fruitfulness and death even as it emphasizes these men’s affinity.
Ashy and murky colours dominate the picture, but faces and weapons gleam in the partially firelit fight; the blues of Brigid’s habit and cloak and the deep crimson of Robin’s blood contrast with the autumnal palette. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), starring Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, might be the king of storybook Robin Hood films, but The Death of Robin Hood is its adult equivalent. Moribund Jackman's Robin might be, but his myth is alive and kicking.
