It’s 1247 England, and a young girl is freezing to death. Trudging through a blinding blizzard, she spots a campfire flickering in the distance. She cautiously approaches the man (Hugh Jackman) at the campfire, who throws her a piece of meat and lets her join him beside the fire. She asks him what he knows of the hero Robin Hood, but he only dismisses the legends of the poor man’s champion as tall tales. “He was a murderous brigand,” he says roughly, which seems to spark a reaction in the young girl. Later that night, the girl creeps up on the man’s sleeping figure with a dagger, but the man jumps to defend himself, fatally stabbing her before gently admonishing her for her mistakes. For he is Robin Hood, and the girl is the latest in a long line of vengeful people looking to repay his blood debts.
The Death of Robin Hood, Michael Sarnoski’s brutally beautiful and meditative new thriller, is a curious new release. For one, its cold, wintry setting seems ill-suited for the summer blockbuster season it’s uneasily entering, and for another, it seems the kind of edgy take on a folkloric hero that fell out of favor 10 years ago. But it’s thanks to Sarnoski, who has a talent for turning genre films like the revenge thriller Pig and the alien-invasion flick A Quiet Place: Day One into introspective character dramas, that The Death of Robin Hood thoughtfully transcends its gritty conceit of “what if Robin Hood was a bad dude.”
The Death of Robin Hood picks up many years after the glory days of Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men. Now, Robin Hood spends his days alone, fending off the dozens of vengeful people whose loved ones he slaughtered during his years as a bandit. Because this Robin Hood, you see, wasn’t the noble hero who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but a ruthless cutthroat who murdered and stole indiscriminately. And all those years of bloodshed have come home to roost, as evidenced by the attempted assassination by the young girl in the opening scene.
But Robin Hood, whom Jackman plays with a hardened gravity not too far removed from his performance in Logan, has resigned himself to dying by one of his blood debts. That’s all he hopes for, he tells his former righthand man, Little John (Bill Skarsgard): “a good death.” But Little John, who has returned to Robin for a favor, urges him to put off that death a little bit longer. In the years since he parted ways with Robin Hood, Little John has settled down, taking on the identity of a farmer (after murdering him, of course), and finding a wife and having a daughter. But the family of the farmer he killed has taken the farm and his family hostage, and he needs Robin’s help to win it back. Robin reluctantly agrees to this one last quest, and they storm the farm and defeat the men — but not before Little John’s wife is slain and Robin is mortally wounded. Against Robin’s will, Little John takes him to be healed at a remote hillside priory, where the gentle Prioress, Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), gives him a second chance at life.
Robin Hood suffers mortal wounds.
The Death of Robin Hood isn’t actually an original tale, but an interpretation of a little-known 17th century ballad, Robin Hood’s Death, in which an injured Robin quietly dies at a priory after a bloodletting gone wrong. It’s one of the stories forgotten to the annals of history, because of how strangely it bookends Robin Hood’s life of gallantry and derring-do — how could such a hero fall in such a mundane and muted way? Sarnoski, who writes and directs The Death of Robin Hood, takes this subversive plot beat and runs with it, transforming Robin Hood’s final days into a meditative, grimly poetic exploration of the cycles of violence and revenge.
The first half of Death of Robin Hood plays it almost painfully straight — with its bleak tone, grimy atmosphere, and frequent shocks of bloodshed, it nearly feels like Sarnoski is approximating Robert Eggers (there’s more than little Northman in the ferocious way that Jackman’s Robin fights too). But cinematographer Pat Scola shoots with such a painterly touch — cloaking the pastoral English landscape in dense fog and deep shadows, that any comparisons to Eggers fade away. And of course, when Robin finally emerges from his near-fatal experience, the sun suddenly bathes the frames in light. Every scene with Comer, who gives a beautifully wistful and tender performance, is positively sun-dappled, giving this remote commune that Sister Brigid has built, an idyllic, near-utopian feeling. There are children running through its orchards, a forest teeming with rabbits, and a mysterious leper (a wonderfully world-weary Murray Bartlett) who acts as the priory’s self-appointed guardian.
The Prioress and the leper.
It’s here where Sarnoski finds his stride and where Death of Robin Hood transcends its grim-dark premise. It takes a hero famous for always being on the run (or perhaps a villain forever fighting off vengeful victims), and makes him stop. Crippled by his injuries and suddenly finding himself the guardian of a frightened little girl, Robin is forced to shed the warrior persona that he’s built up over the years and learn how to be human again. That’s Sarnoski’s magic touch: to build up and break down these grizzled genre tropes — whether they be the fabled hero, the post-apocalyptic survivor, or a particularly muscular truffle farmer — and find the innate humanity in them. Jackman clearly relishes getting to play such a wonderfully complex side to the hardened hero-type he’s become associated with over the years. And through Jackman and Comer’s lovely dynamic, both of them healing from tragic pasts, the film’s somber and grave tone almost feels light. The film doesn’t take the easy route of giving its hero a happy ending — it is, after all, called The Death of Robin Hood — but there’s a strange catharsis in its meeting of similarly tormented souls.
That Sarnoski can create such a tragic figure out of Robin Hood, a hero perhaps most famous today for being a man in tights, is nothing short of miraculous. Hollywood has long struggled to adapt Robin Hood for modern audiences, and Sarnoski may have cracked the code by giving the most subversive version of him: a Robin Hood who may not have been a hero, nor even a villain, but was simply human.
