The Death of Robin Hood (2026) [Movie Review]
Forget the green tights, the merry men, and the cheerful thievery. The Death of Robin Hood takes the most beloved outlaw in English folklore and drags him through the freezing mud of a 13th-century nightmare, recasting the people’s hero as an aged, guilt-ridden killer waiting to die.
Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, the filmmaker behind the quietly devastating Pig, and starring a fully transformed Hugh Jackman, The Death of Robin Hood is one of the most striking and divisive films A24 has released this year. It is grim, gorgeous, brutally violent, and deliberately, sometimes punishingly, slow. Whether you embrace it or reject it will come down entirely to what you want from a Robin Hood movie, and this is emphatically not the one you grew up with.
Table of Contents
The Quick Take
The verdict: The Death of Robin Hood is a bleak, beautifully crafted revisionist character study anchored by a career-best transformation from Hugh Jackman and stunning cinematography from Pat Scola. Michael Sarnoski strips the legend down to a meditation on guilt, violence, and the possibility of grace, but the film’s relentless grimness and sluggish pacing make it a demanding watch that will not be for everyone.
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Performances | 90 / 100 |
| Direction and Craft | 85 / 100 |
| Atmosphere and Visuals | 88 / 100 |
| Pacing and Story | 68 / 100 |
| Overall | 80 / 100 |
Bottom line: See it if you want a serious, somber arthouse take on the legend and a remarkable Jackman performance. Skip it if you want adventure, levity, or a traditional Robin Hood. Best for: Fans of Michael Sarnoski and Pig, admirers of grim revisionist period pieces like Unforgiven, and viewers who appreciate mood and performance over plot and action. One caveat: This is a slow, exceptionally violent, deeply melancholy film. The first act is savagely brutal, and the rest is a quiet meditation on death. Calibrate expectations accordingly. Format reviewed: Theatrical (A24) | 123 minutes | Rated R | Released June 19, 2026.
Forget Everything You Know About the Man in Green
The Death of Robin Hood announces its intentions immediately and without mercy. We are in the year 1247, on the cold Celtic fringe of a 13th-century countryside, and the Robin Hood we meet is not the dashing Errol Flynn, the noble Kevin Costner, or the swashbuckling Sean Connery. He is a grizzled, gray-haired, mud-caked old man wandering a fog-choked wasteland, separated from his long-gone merry men, sunk in a deep and abiding depression. The opening stretch of The Death of Robin Hood is shockingly violent, a series of brutal, graphic encounters that establish this Robin as a man so numb to killing that he barely registers it anymore. One early scene, in which a vengeful woman tries to take her revenge on him, ends with a swift and savage demonstration that the bloodshed in this film will be relentless and unromantic.
This is the boldest choice The Death of Robin Hood makes, and everything else flows from it. Sarnoski has taken the folk hero and reimagined him not as a charming Prince of Thieves but as a medieval equivalent of a Dillinger or a Clyde Barrow, a violent thief and murderer who happens to have been mythologized by people lucky enough never to have crossed his path. In this telling, loosely adapted from the Early Modern English ballad of Robin Hood’s death, Robin has killed women, children, and entire families, leaving a trail of blood debts so vast he can no longer remember them all. The Death of Robin Hood is, in this sense, a complete demolition of everything the legend stands for, and it asks a genuinely provocative question: what if the hero was never a hero at all?
The plot, such as it is, is simple. Robin reconnects with his oldest companion, Little John, and helps him in a desperate, bloody fight to protect John’s family, sustaining severe injuries in the process. Gravely wounded and perhaps hoping that this final battle will at last bring him the death he longs for, Robin is instead nursed back from the brink by a mysterious woman, the prioress of a secluded religious community, and offered a chance at something he never thought he deserved: salvation. From there, The Death of Robin Hood largely abandons action altogether and becomes a quiet, reflective chamber piece about a violent man confronting his soul.
Credit: Aidan Monaghan
A Killer With a Very Good Publicist
The thematic heart of The Death of Robin Hood is the gap between myth and truth, and the film mines that gap for its richest material. As Robin recovers at the priory, going by the assumed name Randall to avoid bringing trouble to the community, he is repeatedly confronted by the stories people tell about him. Some still believe the comforting legend, that he was a thief who stole from the rich to give to the poor, balancing the scales of an unjust world. Robin vehemently rejects this version whenever he hears it. Others know him only as a murderous madman who spent his entire life on a rampage. The Death of Robin Hood makes clear that the latter is closer to the truth, and the film sits in the uncomfortable space between the legend and the man, asking how we mythologize violence and who gets to decide what a life of bloodshed actually meant.
This is heady, ambitious stuff, and it gives The Death of Robin Hood a real intellectual weight that elevates it above mere shock-value grimdark. The film is preoccupied with ideas of balance, forgiveness, mortality, and whether it is possible to break a generational cycle of violence or find inner peace after a lifetime of killing. Sister Brigid, the prioress who saves him, delivers a key speech about balance, noting that the land was once home to druids who worshipped forgotten gods and now serves as a place of healing, a kind of yin and yang stretched across centuries. That speech doubles as both a statement of the film’s themes and a hint at Brigid’s own mysterious nature. The Death of Robin Hood is genuinely interested in the question of whether a man who has done unforgivable things can be redeemed, and it pursues that question with seriousness, even if, as some critics have noted, it does not always reach the deep profundity it reaches for. The ideas are present and provocative, even when the film is more interested in stating them than fully dramatizing them.
The most affecting thread running through The Death of Robin Hood is the title’s grim promise itself, because this is a film about a man who genuinely wants to die. Robin is not fighting to survive in any conventional sense. He is so worn down by guilt and so weary of his own endless violence that death has become the thing he is quietly hoping for, a release he feels he has earned through suffering rather than redemption. What complicates that wish, and gives the film its emotional spine, is the way the priory and the people in it gently pull him back toward life and meaning before the end he seeks finally arrives. The film finds its grace not in cheating Robin’s fate but in granting him a measure of peace before it. Two children in particular, the grieving Margaret and the vengeful, one-eyed Arthur, become the unexpected vehicles for whatever redemption is available to a man like this, mirroring the children his earlier life destroyed. It is a melancholy, mature idea, and when The Death of Robin Hood lands its closing beats, familiar as they may be, the emotional payoff is real. This is ultimately a film about how a violent man might earn a good death, and that is heavier and more interesting territory than any traditional Robin Hood adventure would dare to enter.
Hugh Jackman Trades the Cape for Chainmail
The single best reason to see The Death of Robin Hood is Hugh Jackman, who delivers a performance unlike anything in his long career. Outfitted with a flowing gray mane and a wild, straggly beard, Jackman utterly disappears into this broken, weary, haunted version of Robin Hood. After a quarter-century defined by the heroic charisma of Wolverine and the showmanship of his musical roles, Jackman strips all of that away here, and the contrast is the point. There is a loaded, extratextual weight to casting the actor most associated with playing an indestructible hero as a man who has spent his life destroying others and now wants nothing more than to die. The Death of Robin Hood uses Jackman’s stardom against itself, and he meets the challenge completely.
This is a performance built on exhaustion and interiority rather than heroics. Robin is largely taciturn, communicating his torment through his eyes, his posture, and the weariness in his voice. Early in the film he simply says, “I’m tired,” and Jackman makes you feel the weight of decades of violence in those two words. Critics across the spectrum, even those who disliked the film overall, have singled out Jackman’s work as outstandingly layered and genuinely hard to shake, and it is the kind of fully committed, vanity-free transformation that reminds you what a serious actor he can be when the material demands it. The Death of Robin Hood asks Jackman to carry nearly every frame as a man in spiritual freefall searching for grace, and he delivers a portrait of guilt and weariness that lingers long after the film ends. Whatever its flaws, the film gives Jackman the rawest, most internal showcase of his career, and he does not waste it.
Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgard, and a Bandaged Murray Bartlett
The supporting cast of The Death of Robin Hood is stacked with talent, even if the screenplay, focused so intently on Robin’s interior journey, does not always give them enough to do. Jodie Comer is excellent as Sister Brigid, the prioress who nurses Robin back to health, playing her as a woman of deep understanding and wisdom rather than the villainous figure the character reportedly was in some older versions of the legend. Comer is the perfect counterpoint to Jackman’s brooding, and she provides the film with its essential note of grace and possibility. There is no conventional romance between them, which is the right call, and Comer grounds the film’s spiritual dimension while hinting at her character’s own mysterious and not entirely benevolent depths.
Bill Skarsgard, an actor who specializes in disappearing into roles like Pennywise and Nosferatu, brings a grim, down-and-dirty edge to Little John, Robin’s oldest and most loyal companion, now trying to settle into a quiet life under a new name. Murray Bartlett, nearly unrecognizable beneath layers of bandages as a philosophical leper who befriends Robin, manages the remarkable feat of conveying a full human being through wrappings alone. And Noah Jupe, recently seen in Hamnet, plays Arthur, a vengeful young man who has lost an eye, one of two children whose presence pushes Robin toward his uncertain redemption, alongside the troubled young Margaret played by Faith Delaney. The ensemble of The Death of Robin Hood is uniformly strong and clearly committed, and while the film’s narrow focus leaves several of them underdeveloped, each makes a real impression in service of Robin’s character study. It is a generous, well-cast group elevating material that mostly asks them to reflect and to listen.
Credit: Aidan Monaghan
Michael Sarnoski’s Medieval Slow Burn
The Death of Robin Hood is unmistakably the work of Michael Sarnoski, and understanding his sensibility is key to understanding the film. Sarnoski made his debut with Pig in 2021, the quiet, melancholy, and surprisingly profound Nicolas Cage film about a bearded, grief-stricken loner that became a genuine critical sensation. He followed it with the studio franchise entry A Quiet Place: Day One, proving he could scale up, and now returns to his more personal mode with The Death of Robin Hood. Fans will notice the kinship immediately. Both Pig and this film are about bearded, long-haired loners named Robin, both haunted by dark pasts and groping toward some form of redemption, and both favor brooding, deliberate pacing over conventional plot.
Sarnoski is a filmmaker of real talent and thematic ambition, and The Death of Robin Hood is, on a craft level, an accomplished and frequently beautiful piece of work. But it also represents his somber slow-burn instincts taken to an extreme, and that is where the film becomes divisive. After the explosive violence of the first act, The Death of Robin Hood settles into a quiet, reflective register and largely stays there, prioritizing mood, atmosphere, and contemplation over momentum. For viewers on Sarnoski’s wavelength, this is a feature, a brave refusal to deliver the actionized medieval spectacle the marketing might suggest. For others, it is the film’s central flaw, a stretch where the middle hour can feel interminable. The Death of Robin Hood is exactly the kind of patient, mournful character study Sarnoski has shown he can pull off, and whether it works for you depends almost entirely on your appetite for that mode.
A Western in Chainmail
It is worth situating The Death of Robin Hood within a longer tradition, because the film is far less interested in the swashbuckling Robin Hood canon than in the revisionist Western. The clearest point of comparison is Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, which did to the myth of the heroic gunslinger exactly what Sarnoski does here to the myth of the noble outlaw, dragging a romanticized killer into old age and forcing him to reckon with the bodies he left behind. Like Eastwood’s William Munny, the Robin of The Death of Robin Hood is a man whose legend has outrun the ugly truth of his deeds, and the film treats his violence not as thrilling spectacle but as a moral stain that cannot be scrubbed away. Critics have also reached for Aleksei German’s punishing Hard to Be a God to describe the film’s inescapable medieval grime, and the comparison is apt. This is a vision of the Middle Ages as filth, fear, and casual slaughter, with none of the storybook gloss.
That lineage is the key to approaching The Death of Robin Hood on its own terms. Sarnoski is not trying to compete with Ridley Scott’s earthy 2010 Robin Hood or to out-action any prior version. He is using the bones of a familiar legend to make a meditative film about mortality and consequence, the same way the great revisionist Westerns used the iconography of the frontier to interrogate American myths of violence. Whether that approach excites or alienates you is largely a matter of taste, but it is a coherent and serious artistic project rather than a botched blockbuster. The Death of Robin Hood knows exactly what kind of film it wants to be, and it pursues that vision with total conviction, which is precisely why it lands so hard for some viewers and leaves others cold.
Pat Scola Paints With Mud and Light
If Jackman is the film’s heart, cinematographer Pat Scola is its other great star, and the visual craftsmanship of The Death of Robin Hood is genuinely stunning. Scola, Sarnoski’s regular collaborator who also shot Pig, photographed the film on 35mm, and the texture and richness of the celluloid is everywhere on screen. The Death of Robin Hood is one of the most visually striking films of the year, and Scola’s work is doing enormous expressive heavy lifting throughout, telling much of the story through image alone.
The most impressive technique is the way the film’s look evolves to mirror Robin’s spiritual journey. The opening battle sequences are presented in foreboding, darkly lit full widescreen, all hellish, desaturated, near-monochrome images of senseless, unrelenting violence that feel almost shot onto volcanic ash. Then, as Robin arrives at the priory and the possibility of renewal enters the story, the aspect ratio narrows and the palette warms, light and color creeping into the frame like an oasis after the desert of the opening. As the inevitable end approaches, the darkness returns. It is a sophisticated, fully integrated visual strategy, with cinematography, production design by David Lee, and the shifting frame all working in concert to externalize Robin’s interior state. Even viewers who find The Death of Robin Hood a slog tend to concede that it is magnificently shot, and on the biggest screen possible, the film is a feast for the eyes even when it is testing your patience.
Not Very Merry: The Pacing Problem
Now for the honest reckoning, because The Death of Robin Hood is a genuinely divisive film, and a fair review has to lay out both sides. The criticisms are consistent and worth taking seriously. The most common is pacing. Multiple critics have found the film sluggish to the point of tedium, a beautifully made but overlong slog where very little happens for long stretches and the deliberate slowness curdles into monotony. One prominent review memorably summed up the experience by noting that you spend much of the runtime wishing the main character would die a quicker death, which, given the title, is a brutal but not entirely unfair assessment of how the film’s languid back half can land.
The other recurring complaint is the violence. The first act of The Death of Robin Hood is savagely, graphically brutal, and while some find it a bracing statement of intent, others, including critics at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, found the relentless savagery over the top and ultimately distracting from the storytelling, a case of raw brutality substituting for depth. And there is a broader, almost philosophical objection that some viewers will share: by stripping away the steal-from-the-rich, give-to-the-poor nobility that made Robin Hood beloved in the first place, the film arguably guts the very thing that makes the character resonant, leaving a grim character study that wears a famous name without honoring its spirit. My honest take is that The Death of Robin Hood mostly earns its bleakness through the strength of Jackman’s performance and the beauty of its craft, and that its meditation on guilt and grace is sincere and often moving. But it is undeniably a demanding, joyless, slow film, and the 70 percent critical split on Rotten Tomatoes reflects a genuine divide. If you need momentum, action, or even a little levity, The Death of Robin Hood will frustrate you. If you can surrender to its mournful rhythm, there is real reward in it.
A Tough Sell at the Box Office
It comes as little surprise that The Death of Robin Hood has struggled commercially, and the context is worth noting for anyone weighing whether to catch it in theaters. The film opened to what is reportedly Hugh Jackman’s lowest wide-release box office debut in five years, a soft start that reflects just how far this grim, R-rated arthouse drama sits from the four-quadrant blockbusters audiences might expect from a Robin Hood movie or a Jackman vehicle. This is not a populist crowd-pleaser, and it was never going to be. It is a stark, spare, festival-bred character piece, financed modestly through Lyrical Media and the Ryder Picture Company and distributed by A24, the studio that has built its brand on exactly this kind of uncompromising, filmmaker-driven work.
In a way, the commercial underperformance of The Death of Robin Hood is the predictable cost of its ambition. A film this committed to subverting and darkening a beloved legend, this allergic to crowd-pleasing convention, was always going to be a niche proposition, and the marketing’s hints of medieval action set up an audience that the actual film, a slow and somber meditation on death, was bound to disappoint. That tension, between what people want from Robin Hood and what Sarnoski insists on giving them, is baked into the project. The Death of Robin Hood is a film made on its own terms, indifferent to the expectations its title carries, and while that integrity is admirable, it also explains why the film has found a warmer reception among critics attuned to Sarnoski’s sensibility than among general audiences looking for a summer adventure. It is, by design, a hard sell, and the box office has borne that out.
Film Specifications
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Film Title | The Death of Robin Hood |
| Year | 2026 |
| Director | Michael Sarnoski |
| Screenplay | Michael Sarnoski |
| Based on | The 17th-century ballad Robin Hood’s Death |
| Studio / Distributor | A24 |
| Cast | Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgard, Murray Bartlett, Noah Jupe, Faith Delaney, Jade Croot |
| Cinematography | Pat Scola (shot on 35mm film) |
| Music | Jim Ghedi |
| Editing | Andrew Mondshein |
| Production Design | David Lee |
| Production Companies | Lyrical Media, Ryder Picture Company |
| Producers | Aaron Ryder, Andrew Swett, Alexander Black, Hugh Jackman |
| Filming Location | Northern Ireland |
| Setting | 1247 AD |
| Runtime | 123 minutes |
| Rating | R |
| World Premiere | June 12, 2026 (73rd Sydney Film Festival) |
| US Release Date | June 19, 2026 |
Should You See The Death of Robin Hood? The Final Word
The Death of Robin Hood is a bold, uncompromising, and genuinely accomplished piece of filmmaking that will absolutely not work for everyone, and that is more or less by design. Michael Sarnoski has made a stark, mournful, beautifully crafted meditation on guilt, violence, and the slim possibility of redemption, and he has anchored it with a transformative Hugh Jackman performance that ranks among the finest of the actor’s career. The supporting cast is strong, Pat Scola’s 35mm cinematography is breathtaking, and the film’s central ideas about myth, truth, and the cost of a violent life are provocative and sincere. On craft and ambition alone, The Death of Robin Hood deserves real respect.
But there is no getting around the fact that this is a slow, grim, and demanding film, one that trades every ounce of the legend’s traditional fun for unrelenting bleakness and a deliberately punishing pace. If you walk in expecting adventure, heroism, or even basic momentum, you will be disappointed, and the critical and commercial divide around the film is entirely understandable. My honest recommendation is this: if you are an admirer of Sarnoski’s Pig, if you love a serious, somber, gorgeously shot character study in the vein of Unforgiven, and if you are prepared for a film that earns its title in the most literal and melancholy way, The Death of Robin Hood is well worth your time and a remarkable showcase for Hugh Jackman. If that does not describe you, this is one legend you may want to let rest in peace. The Death of Robin Hood is playing in theaters now.
The Death of Robin Hood (A24) | R | 123 minutes | Released June 19, 2026
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The Death of Robin Hood is in theaters now from A24.
