The Death of Robin Hood (2026)

Hugh Jackman has spent much of his career playing men who cannot outrun what they are, and Robin Hood proves no exception.

Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood opens in 1247, with a battle-scarred, bedraggled Robin sheltering from a wintry storm, burying the bodies of those who keep arriving to settle old scores. After one final violent outing to help an old companion, he ends up gravely wounded and taken in by a priory, placed in the reluctant care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer). What follows is a slow reckoning with the gap between legend and biography; what the ballads chose to remember, and what they preferred to forget.

The film’s most interesting idea is one it never quite trusts itself to pursue. This Robin did not steal from the rich to give to the poor. He stole from everyone, gave to no one, and left behind enough grieving families to populate a small county. The mythologising happened anyway, because myths are not about accuracy; they are about need. Sarnoski understands this, and there are moments when the film says something genuinely sharp about the stories societies construct to dignify their most useful criminals. Those moments feel like brief clearings in cloud cover, and the overcast closes in again before any argument has time to form.

Jackman is well-cast in ways that go beyond the obvious Logan comparison. He carries a lifetime of received heroism into a role that systematically dismantles it, and his physical performance, gaunt, coiled, hollowed out, does the work that the screenplay occasionally neglects. Comer is even better, playing Brigid as a woman whose composure conceals its own history of violence. When the two performers are given material to work with, the film justifies its austerity. Sarnoski lingers on mood at the expense of drama, though, and two hours of medieval grimness require more propulsion than beautiful cinematography alone can supply.

Pat Scola’s cinematography is the film’s most consistent pleasure: early scenes are desaturated and dim, the colour palette slowly warming as Robin approaches something resembling human connection. Lorna Ó Ríordáin’s costume design impresses with tactile period detail, and Jim Ghedi’s folk score sustains the film’s mournful register without overselling it.

Pacing is where the film struggles. For extended stretches, it mistakes inertia for weight. Sarnoski holds on silences and lingers on Jackman’s weathered face long enough to suggest that atmosphere, for him, is its own form of argument; a debatable proposition, and one the running time tests. A film about a man who has run out of time probably should not make its audience feel that way too.

Bill Skarsgård brings brief, unsettling energy to Little John, a man who kills for a loaf of bread and calls it a transaction. His presence in the first act promises a harder, stranger film than the one Sarnoski delivers.

The Death of Robin Hood is not a failure. It has conviction and performances that carry more weight than the script asks of them, and somewhere beneath its brooding surface there is a worthwhile argument about the costs of violence and the uses of legend. What it lacks is the willingness to make that argument explicit, to give the audience something to hold onto beyond a generalised atmosphere of regret. Sarnoski has made a film with genuine ambitions and a star fully capable of meeting them, which makes it, in my opinion, all the more frustrating that the two never quite connect.