REVIEW

‘THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD’ Is a Lyrical Meditation on the Myth of Violent Heroes

By Matt Oakes · June 17, 2026

Christopher Columbus. Alexander the Great. George Washington. Jesse James. Wyatt Earp. Robin Hood. History has a funny way of sanding down violent men until their sharp edges become smooth enough for children’s stories. Conquest becomes glorious exploration. Bloodshed becomes bravery. Outlaws become folk heroes. Give it enough time and enough retellings and suddenly the barbarity gets lacquered over with myth, the blood washed clean by the convenience of lore. Truth is nothing compared to legend.

Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood begins by rejecting that entire premise. The Robin Hood we meet here is not the noble thief of storybook folklore, not some merry champion of the poor skipping through Sherwood with a quiver full of moral righteousness. He tells us as much himself. There was no great romance with Maid Marian. No righteous campaign against a nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham. No tidy legacy of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Maybe he killed a few lawmen along the way. And then people just either wanted or needed to believe the rest. The legend is a farce. The reality is much uglier.

Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman) is an aging killer living alone in the mountains, haunted by guilt and the long shadow of consequence. He has built a life from violence and now spends his twilight years waiting for that violence to collect. Sons, daughters, brothers, friends, and distant relations of the people he’s slaughtered throughout the years arrive one by one, each hoping to carve their own pound of flesh from the old outlaw’s hide. Robin, in turn, grants them little mercy. He kills men, women, and children alike with weary efficiency.

Sarnoski establishes this world in grisly, unblinking terms. The violence is not balletic or exciting. It is blunt, ugly, and spiritually corrosive. The early scenes have a sparse, mythic quality, but whatever myth surrounded this Robin Hood has curdled. He is as a man already half-buried by his own reputation, a relic perhaps even hungry for his own demise, begging his God to send someone capable of finally putting him out of his misery.

Then, in a clever inversion of the usual hero’s journey, The Death of Robin Hood begins with bloodshed only to gradually become a movie about rehabilitation. After coming to the aid of his trusty companion Little John (Bill Skarsgård) – whose described here simply as “murderous” – and his daughter Margaret, Robin is gravely wounded and brought to a remote island priory where violence is meant to hold no dominion. There, he is cared for by the empathetic Prioress, Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a woman carrying her own scars from a life similarly wrecked by brutality.

What follows is very much the A24-ification of Robin Hood, and people’s reaction to the film will depend on whether that sounds promising or more like a threat, as well as how much patience they have for brooding medieval men muttering about sin in candlelight. It is decidedly not the rousing bow-and-arrow adventure some audiences may be expecting. In fact, The Death of Robin Hood has more in common with 28 Years Later than with most previous iterations of this character. It is quiet, meditative, and often driven by the unspoken moments of recognition that pass between damaged people trying to determine whether they are beyond saving.

That approach does come with drawbacks. The second act occasionally sags, and a movie that begins with a sense of brutal expansiveness suddenly becomes much smaller and more internal. Viewers expecting macho outlaw carnage may get restless once the film retreats into the priory and starts contemplating the residue violence leaves on the soul. But the shift is also the entire point of this movie. Sarnoski is not interested in the thrill of violence so much as the afterlife of it: the lifelong grudges it creates, the identities it hardens, the generations it recruits into the same bloody churn.

The Death of Robin Hood becomes less a story about one man’s possible redemption than a warning to those standing behind him with their own generational grudges and knives drawn. Robin’s great final lesson is not that violence made him legendary. It is that violence made him hollow. To inherit his rage is to step onto the same hamster wheel of blood and grievance that has already ground him down to bone.

This makes the title itself satisfyingly slippery. Is the death of Robin Hood literal? Spiritual? Mythological? Is the man dying, or is the legend finally being put out of its misery? Sarnoski’s script keeps those possibilities alive throughout, circling questions of sin, atonement, and the stories we tell ourselves so the people we love might survive us.

The catalyst for that transformation arrives in the form of Margaret (Katie Breen). Breen is excellent in a role that could have easily become little more than a narrative device, bringing a stubborn resilience and emotional intelligence that quietly reshapes the film. As Robin gradually assumes a protective role in Margaret’s life, something shifts. For perhaps the first time, his instincts are no longer directed toward survival, conquest, or vengeance so much as toward safeguarding someone else. It’s a world-altering change, and one that defines the rest of our time spent with him. The outlaw who for years took from the world begins, however reluctantly, to give something back.

The film’s exploration of that pivot can be punishingly solemn and pretty much humorless, but its severity feels purposeful. This is not a movie trying to make Robin Hood fun again. Nor is it trying to do whatever it was that Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe were attempting in making a “gritty retelling” of the same hero’s journey. This story is more focused on exhuming the legacy of a living legend to bury him with his sins intact to tell us a story about the corrosive nature of violence and the myth of violent men.

Jackman carries that burden well. He has always had the physical presence for this particular sort of thing, and the film occasionally lets him tap into the blockbuster brawn that made him a star, but this is much far guided by interior work than action-hero posturing. His Robin is weathered, wounded, and spiritually exhausted. The wrinkles etched across his face feel like open trenches, bloody little craters carved by time and regret. Jackman makes him frightening without turning him into a monster and tragic without sanding away the ugliness of what he has done.

Skarsgård, meanwhile, continues his campaign to become the least visually recognizable actor in Hollywood. As Little John, he disappears so completely into the role that it took me a few active minutes of squinting to register who it was I was watching. Comer is equally strong as the Prioress, bringing a wholesomeness and moral gravity to a character who could have easily become a simple vessel for Robin’s redemption. Her chemistry with Jackman is wounded and alluring, built less on romance than on the shared recognition of people who have seen what violence takes and know it never gives back in equal measure.

The film’s craft is essential to that effect. Shot on gorgeous 35mm film on location in Northern Ireland, Sarnoski’s direction and screenplay work in close harmony to deliver this inversion of a hero’s journey, creating something that begins quite grisly and traditionally grabby before becoming fundamentally built around quietude. If the first act is the movie that audiences are expecting to see, the last two are a hard pivot towards something solemn, sparse, patient, and sometimes almost aggressively uninterested in conventional thrills. It can be a downright unfun watch, but not an unserious one. Sarnoski knows what he is doing. He wants you to sit in the quiet after the killing. He wants the wind to whip and howl a little too long. He wants the blood to keep dripping long enough so that no one dares call it glorious.

Cinematographer Pat Scola gives that transformation a striking visual shape. Early passages are moody, dark, and firelit, shot in a world of torches, candles, mud, and blood. Robin seems trapped inside the legend that has swallowed him whole. But as his relationship with Margaret deepens and the possibility of a different life emerges, the film begins to open up. Even the aspect ratio shifts toward something more portrait-like and storybook, while natural light fights its way through fog, illuminating a path forward that has less to do with conquest than protection. The movie finds beauty inside all the ugliness.

Jim Ghedi’s score is similarly vital, weaving folk hymns and mournful textures through long stretches of near-silence. Just as often, the music disappears entirely, leaving only the whipping winds of the island and the hush of people too broken to say what they mean. Silences that create room for reflection.

The Death of Robin Hood ultimately succeeds because it understands that myth is often just violence with really solid PR. It is not asking whether Robin Hood deserves redemption so much as why we are so desperate to believe violent men can be redeemed in the first place. Sarnoski’s film is creaky in places, and its narrowing, meditative second act may test the patience of those hoping for a more traditional outlaw saga, but its final movement brings the whole bruised thing into focus.

This is not Robin Hood reborn. It is Robin Hood deprogrammed. A folk hero stripped of ballads, romance, and righteousness until only his bloody body and his bloody body of work remains. Old. Scarred. Regretful. Waiting to find out whether a lifetime of violence can end in anything other than more violence.

CONCLUSION: Michael Sarnoski’s ‘The Death of Robin Hood’ strips the folk hero of his mythic nobility, transforming the outlaw legend into a bruising meditation on violence, regret, and the stories we tell to make bloodshed easier to swallow. Uneven but often profound, this lyrical revisionist tale finds haunting beauty in the wreckage of a life shaped by brutality.