Hugh Jackman Stars in Dour Revisionist Drama
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL SARNOSKI/2026
Here we have Unforgiven for Robin Hood by way of copped Robert Eggers (The Witch; The Northman) aesthetic starring Old Man Logan. The clothes are all rags, no one enunciates, and the main theme music sounds distractingly like Scarborough Fair. Derivation from multiple angles muddies the surface of this independently produced slog (distributed by A24), The Death of Robin Hood, a film whose title not only foretells the main character’s probable premature fate, but reveals its bubble-bursting intentions in regard to gathered notions of a hero that people in past times (and maybe even now) very much needed. Robin Hood is literally and figuratively dragged through the mud.
It’s 1247 Anno Domini, only fifteen or so years prior to the first written references to what, in reality, would be multiple versions of Robin Hood figures spread out across time and geography. In The Death of Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest is swapped out for a perpetually foggy, misty, stoney no man’s land. The film’s barren, anti-saturated Northern Ireland landscape lends itself to shuddering vibes of pagan folk horror, though without any such genre-laden horror. There are no merry men to be found (barely any men at all), in Robin’s camp or anywhere else. Maid Marian? Never existed. Friar Tuck? Never heard of him. Little John? Just another poor slob (and, Bill Skarsgård) unfortunate enough to get mixed up with our central psychopath.
Hugh Jackman, sporting long lovely silver locks and his trademark Wolverine glare, stars as the aging outlaw Robin Hood, a roving brutal killer who, unbeknownst to him, according to the title, is doomed to die in this film. But honestly, whatever life he has left in him can’t be much. He’s killed everything that walks or crawls, I reckon. When we see his ruthlessness in action, it is viscerally horrific- not only wildly conflicting with the dashing do-gooder depiction of Hood that’s become his default cultural portrait, but also for how senseless all of it is.
And yet, director Michael Sarnoski’s (Pig; A Quiet Place: Day One) bleak, historically coded take on the character may not be as revisionist as it seems. According to author and historian Stephen Lawhead, writer of the novel Hood, “in the earliest stories, Robin was no honorable Errol Flynn-esque hero. He was a coarse and vulgar oaf much given to crudeness and violence. He was a thief from the beginning, to be sure, but the now-famous creed of “robbing from the rich to give to the poor” was a few hundred years removed from his rough highwayman origins. The early Robin robbed from the rich, to be sure and kept every silver English penny for himself.”
This Robin is even worse, murdering his way through life while bearing his own gruesome internal cargo with all the outwardly calloused angst one might expect from a 2026 imagining of such a variant. Masculine? Sure. But hardly a man, as that would require a shred of basic humanity. His soul isn’t in there anywhere. What this movie presupposes is, “What if it was?”
Jackman is dynamic and magnetic enough to sell this villainous version of Robin Hood as an antihero of sorts simply via his suppressed charisma. I’m not saying that this Robin Hood could publicly shoot someone on 5th Avenue with his trusty bow and arrow, and still get enough votes to win at the box office (he can’t and won’t), but it seems to be enough for the other prominent characters in the film. First among them is a quietly intense nun-like woman portrayed by Jodie Comer, who, thoroughly unbeknownst of his bloody doings, takes him in and nurses him back to health following an injury. From here on, The Death of Robin Hood is as boring as it looks.
Comer’s character, Sister Brigid, with her Joan of Arc hair and mysterious self-assurance, is more interesting than Robin Hood. She may even harbor some form of clairvoyance, evidenced by one her The Tree of Life-esque whispering voiceovers, she goes on about how the universe is made up of atoms, all woven together. Huh? It’s 1247 A.D. How, m’lady, could you possibly know that?? The Hand of God is hard enough to see in this world of theirs, much less the wonders of science. In Brigid’s presence and among the community of survivors and orphans she oversees, Hood, going by a made-up name, begins to soften. Will his past catch up with him before the title makes good with itself? Who will print the legend of the legendary Hood we’ve come to love? Anyone…?
Not that every silver screen offering must be glistening escapism, but a good time at the movies this is not. The Death of Robin Hood stands and falls in its full-on commitment to itself, that much is certain. But it’s hard to pin down exactly what, here in our own widely fractured fairy tale world, might’ve triggered this seriously nihilistic story in this moment in the world. But here we are, stuck unpacking it. But beware: reach in to do so, and sharpened arrowheads await. Though, as a different grizzled aging killer once articulated in a much better film, “we all have it coming.”