YNOT at the Movies

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski sets out to strip the nobility from Robin Hood with "The Death of Robin Hood" (USA 2026 | 123 min.), and replace it with honest medieval brutality. He's done that, and almost nothing else.

The film sets the story of the outlaw in the Celtic fringe of 1247 A.D. Robin (Hugh Jackman) appears looking worse than anyone sleeping rough on a city street today, draped in layers of sodden fur and barely distinguishable from the mud he crawls through. He is, by design, a feral, self-mythologizing killer waiting for a death that's long overdue. After being pulled back into violence by his old partner Little John (Bill Skarsgård), Robin winds up gravely wounded at a hillside priory under the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a prioress with her own obscured past. Also living at the priory is the Leper (Murray Bartlett), another broken man surviving outside of society, who becomes Robin's most uncomfortable companion: part confessor, part provocateur, forcing Robin to look at himself without the mythology.

The Northern Irish locations are breathtaking in their ancient desolation, all rolling hills and rock-face under vast grey skies. Cinematographer Pat Scola shoots on celluloid and the landscape earns every foot of film. The fog, though, almost never lifts, literally or figuratively, and the film mistakes this shroud for atmosphere. Director Michael Sarnoski parks the camera in the murk and waits for profundity to arrive.

It mostly doesn't. The accent work across the ensemble is so thickly regional that key scenes become auditory puzzles rather than dramatic ones. The storytelling compounds the problem. For example, the bloodletting sequences between Brigid and Robin, drawn from the medieval ballads that inspired the film, might be meant to carry spiritual weight, but what exactly Brigid is doing to Robin's arm and why is never made legible enough to bear it.

The violence in the opening act is deliberately sloppy and ugly, distinguished from period-film spectacle. It also comes in waves that are harrowing to sit through and largely disconnected from any emotional stakes we've been given reason to feel. When Robin's death comes, it doesn't feel as earned salvation but as a formality the film was always going to observe regardless of whether we cared.

Hugh Jackman commits fully and there are flashes of something raw in the performance. Jodie Comer brings an otherworldly stillness to Brigid, a woman with a traumatic history the film gestures at without ever revealing. Murray Bartlett plays the Leper almost entirely through layers of bandages. The film hints that the true identity of the Leper has roots in the original Robin Hood ballads, but it is still written more as a vessel for grace than as a person.

However, Jim Ghedi's folk score is the film's most distinctive contribution: raw, ancient in feeling, and dark without overdoing it.

This is a serious film with serious intentions. It's also a difficult, confusing, and joyless experience that offers landscapes worth seeing and almost nothing worth feeling.

"The Death of Robin Hood" opens in theaters on Friday, June 19, 2026.