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Michael Sarnoski's grim new film reimagines Robin Hood as a murderous thief, with Hugh Jackman delivering a sombre performance opposite Jodie Comer in a stark, violence-soaked meditation on myth and reinvention.
What is it about Australians and the legend of Robin Hood? From Errol Flynn of Tasmania, to Russell Crowe who grew up in Sydney and took the role for Ridley Scott, and now Hugh Jackman stepping into the part for a strikingly bleak new interpretation by the director of Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One, performers from that part of the world seem drawn to the outlaw of Sherwood.
Perhaps it is their understanding of the outdoor life that gives them the necessary ruggedness. Whatever the reason, Michael Sarnoski's film lands firmly in the revisionist camp. Given how most modern filmmakers now approach the character, the truly daring move would be to portray him in a feathered cap while dancing to Alan-a-Dale's lute. There is none of that here.
The Death of Robin Hood begins with a storm and gets gradually more miserable from there. Sarnoski's own script, loosely inspired by the anonymous seventeenth-century ballad Robin Hood's Death, makes it clear early on that almost everything audiences have heard about the supposed hero is a lie. The year is 1247 and the ageing Robin is a self-serving thief and murderer, forever fending off revenge attacks from the relations of those he has slain.
Further echoes of a violent past emerge when Little John, played by Bill Skarsgård, asks for help to reclaim his farm from the family that has taken it over. To say the ensuing battle is brutal is to understate the case. Here is a film that will not hesitate to put an arrow through a child's head. The nihilistic embrace of an animalistic past is comparable to that in Aleksei German's famously bleak 2013 sci-fi allegory.
Sarnoski revels in the half-light and the quarter-darkness, and the film was shot in Northern Ireland, where the coastal beauty matches the tone. Nottinghamshire, the traditional home of Robin Hood, cannot pretend to this level of ruthless scenery. There is a sense of the world coming to a desperate end. Which it nearly does.
After the fighting is over, an injured Robin awakes under the care of nuns in the starkly attractive Priory of St Clement. His most conspicuous carer, coiffured for the cover of a 1968 singer-songwriter album, is Jodie Comer as the endlessly patient Sister Bridget. The contrast between the film's opening third, and what turns out to be the main body, is perhaps too striking.
After an extended period of skulls being split, the audience is now at home to spluttering candles, quiet crop tending and the contemplation of eternity. Robin is thrown among puzzling recluses such as a leper, played by Murray Bartlett in a role unrecognisable from his turn as the resort manager in the first series of The White Lotus, who may have connections with Robin's violent prehistory.
The jarring shift from hyper-action to medieval reverie may explain why, on its US release, the film received decidedly mixed reviews. It asks for a leap of faith from its audience. The interactions between Jackman and Comer are nicely judged in their skirting of awkward truths. As the film progresses, it becomes clear the story is heading toward an engagement with the comfort of myth and the guilty pleasures of historical reinvention.
Those ideas play out in a touching late speech that, nudging aside the film's earlier longueurs, unexpectedly returns the audience to the innocence of the Errol Flynn version. There have been many revisionist Robin Hood films, but Sarnoski makes the case that, if properly realised, such a thing may still pass the time pleasurably. Those queasy about on-screen violence should, nonetheless, approach with appropriate caution
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