The Death of Robin Hood Is Logan on … Well, Not Steroids, Exactly

Hugh Jackman has been here before, it seems. In Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, the actor plays the weathered title hero in the winter of his life. At first, it doesn’t feel too far removed from the aging, rueful superhero Jackman played in 2017’s alt-Wolverine tale, Logan, which felt at the time like modern Hollywood’s last word in revisionist grimdark mythology. (Instead, we got many more, and lesser, movies like it.) The Death of Robin Hood takes things to even greater extremes. An embittered wanderer haunting the hills of rural England in the year 1247, this Robin mutters to a hungry girl he encounters in the opening scenes that he was in fact a “murderous brigand” who “robbed and killed for the joy of it” and that legends of his generosity are all lies. We might assume at first that he’s exaggerating, but he soon backs up his words when he knifes said girl just as she’s sneaking up on him at night. Before he stabs her in the head, he praises her skill, then advises her that she should have either bathed or waited for the wind to change before making her move. Always helpful, that Robin. This girl, it turns out, is one of many who have sought him over the years, looking to avenge loved ones he’s massacred. Robin drags her corpse to a hillside where he buries his dead. An overhead shot reveals many, many graves.

So this isn’t just some tale of weathered regret. No, this Robin Hood is beyond brutal; he might as well be a serial killer. He’s particularly good, it seems, at hitting his fleeing victims in the eye with an arrow. And at first, the only thing keeping the film from feeling like a revisionist genre in-joke (think Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey) is Sarnoski’s artful dedication to capturing the bleak grandeur of his milieu. This rough, lived-in world, muddy and bloody and rural and poor, reflects the brutality of the man at its center. And Jackman, who does rage so well, convinces us of the self-aware cruelty of this broken, decaying old killer. He hates himself, which just makes him that much more violent.

This would be too much were the film to continue in this vein: too bleak, too dark, too sad, too grotesque. But after a debilitatingly savage first act, The Death of Robin Hood moves to the remote island priory of St. Clement, where a wounded Robin winds up in the care of the quiet prioress, Sister Brigid (an excellent and ethereal Jodie Comer), amid sunny gardens and peaceful grounds populated by orphan children and other castoffs from society, including a leper (Murray Bartlett) with a philosophical disposition. There, the injured Robin tries to find productive outlets for his violence, hunting rabbits and performing otherwise useful tasks for the priory.

It goes almost without saying that the past will catch up to him at some point, though Sarnoski admirably keeps the picture from sinking back into the realm of indulgent vengeance tales. For all its irreverence, there’s little in The Death of Robin Hood that’s particularly surprising, and one wonders at times what the film, for all its elegant performances and occasional lyricism, is trying to achieve. Is Sarnoski going for the type of period immersion we find in Robert Eggers’s films? He never quite plunges us into the psychology of the era: We don’t really see this world from the inside out, as we do in The Witch and The Northman. We still feel like 21st-century viewers watching an offbeat and perhaps period-authentic take on Robin Hood.

Still, it does make us wonder: Why do we enjoy such tales in the first place? Almost 35 years ago, Clint Eastwood released his masterpiece Unforgiven, which presented a dark, new spin on the violent anti-heroes he’d spent a lifetime playing. Eastwood had simultaneously undercut and indulged in western iconography his whole career, and the appeal of his work often lay in the peculiar balance it struck between our longing for authenticity and our desire for heroism. The fact that his flawed, haunted characters managed to do good in a world so thoroughly debased made them that much more compelling. And that much more relatable: We like to see our heroes brought low because we understand that we can never be like them in their idealized form.

But this Robin Hood isn’t just flawed and human; he’s a monster, albeit a self-conscious one. By pushing the nihilism off the charts, however, Sarnoski finds an idea that emerges fully in the movie’s closing act. The Death of Robin Hood is all about storytelling, which is appropriate because its narrative is a retrospective one: Everything important has seemingly already happened by the time the picture starts, and everybody’s looking back. As a result, much of the film involves characters telling tales that then morph into myths. They dwell on words that can change a memory’s meaning. They switch names and knowingly hide truths to preserve themselves and others. The clarity they lack in the moment they find in the remembering. Along the way, we get the sense that the only way Robin can fully reconcile himself to his past is not by killing more people, but by changing the way these stories are told. Maybe that’s the ultimate purpose of this movie’s relentless darkness. Amid all this desolation, we come to understand the beauty of myth. We need the legends and their lies, because the world is otherwise too unbearable.

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