Myth gets brutally dispatched in The Death of Robin Hood, A Quiet Place: Day One filmmaker Michael Sarnoski‘s dark, loose adaptation of the 17th-century ballad Robin Hood’s Death. The 13th-century outlaw gets a gritty makeover in a subversion of his legendary heroics, forcing a reckoning as Robin Hood seeks peace and death in his final days. Sarnoski’s deconstruction of popularized myth comes forged in shocking violence and poignant introspection, yielding another deeply affecting story of meeting death on your own terms.
The Death of Robin Hood bypasses rehashing the origins of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, instead introducing a grizzled brute who opens the film with a ruthless culling of a young girl seeking vengeance against the outlaw. It’s a downright gentle introduction to Hugh Jackson’s Robin, who only escalates the jaw-dropping carnage when reunited with righthand Little John (Bill Skarsgård) as they seek to reclaim Little John’s home and family from vengeance seekers. These early sequences set up a stark contrast to the Disney-fied legends; Robin Hood’s heroics have been grossly exaggerated compared to the blood debts his violent exploits have racked up over the decades, which in turn have made him a hunted man spanning generations.
Grave injuries from battle lands Robin on a remote island priory under the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer, 28 Years Later), where the strange, idyllic community, an enigmatic leper (Murray Bartlett), and a traumatized young girl, Margaret (Faith Delaney), force him to confront his legacy.
Sarnoski, who writes and directs, makes the hero the villain in his adaptation, ensuring a deeply rewarding character arc. At every point in the film, Robin is openly, often actively, seeking death. The stroke of poetic beauty here is that his view of a worthy death seismically shifts from beginning to end. What’s a hero’s death? That answer deepens and evolves along with its “hero” in his waning years. All the impressive survival instincts and battle savagery can’t outmatch or outrun endless cycles of death and loss, after all, despite Robin’s attempts to shrug off his own myth over the years.
Those cycles of violence loom large as a constant threat as the aged outlaw finds himself surrounded by those directly impacted by his past. It breeds conflict, external and internal, reflected in tense encounters and tenuous alliances that let Robin’s humanity slowly slip through his hardened survivor’s shell. It’s the type of role with just enough similarities that’ll draw inevitable comparisons to Hugh Jackman’s stellar work on Logan, but the tenured actor quickly sets the emotionally and morally complex Robin apart, whose primal ruthlessness belies a surprising capacity for aching empathy.
While it’s Robin’s relationship with Sister Brigid that drives his final story to its soulful conclusion, it’s the unexpected friendship between the outlaw and the cautious Leper that has the greatest impact. A quiet conversation between the pair comes barbed with soul-shattering revelations, one that irrevocably alters Robin’s outlook while serving as one of the bolder myth revisions. Still, it’s Comer’s quiet heartbreak that yields the film’s biggest devastation.
Sarnoski depicts medieval life for all its cruelty and filth. Death is not remotely gentle in the 13th century; it’s downright nasty and vicious. Cinematographer Pat Scola captures it with startlingly dark realism and grit, but so, too, the breathtaking Northern Ireland landscape that provides this intimate tale with the scale of a sprawling epic.
The Death of Robin Hood removes the simple binary of heroes and villains, combining both into a complicated interrogation of myth itself. But the biggest magic feat is its demonstration of how myth-making and storytelling can heal even the most grievous wounds, and even provide peace if earned.
The Death of Robin Hood releases in theaters on June 19, 2026.
