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From writer-director Michael Sarnoski (Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One ) comes a story of violence, vengeance, and the dark truth behind the beloved tale of a hero that never was. In this raw, subversive reimagining of Robin Hood’s waning years, the outlaw of legend is not the man in the myths — and the fables surrounding him that we’ve come to know are left bloodied and thrashing in the mud.

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“In The Death of Robin Hood, Robin has managed to outlive his time as an outlaw and participated in creating a legend around himself that becomes this curse he wears around his neck,” says Sarnoski. “He’s
tormented by this perception of being a hero when deep inside he knows that he was not. As he approaches death, how can he make peace with the sins of his past and reckon with the wrongful myths he created?”

Played by Hugh Jackman with bracing ferocity and a hard-won emotional complexity, Robin is at first glance a grizzled monster of a man whose life and experience are borne out of a world scarred by
cycles of violence and pure, savage survival.

“We have this idea of Robin Hood dancing around in the woods with his Merry Men, but life back then was not like that. Peasants were beating each other to death with shovels,” says Sarnoski. “I thought to myself, what is the version of Robin Hood that is more truthful and honest to the roughness of life in the 13th century?”

In Sarnoski’s bold retelling, a gravely injured Robin winds up in the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a benevolent prioress who nurses his wounds as he inches toward death, a subversion Sarnoski felt was more spiritually true to the original ballads and the medieval mores in which they take place.

Met with startling compassion by his caregiver, Robin sees the possibility of another way — if he can only embrace it for himself before his time is up. Audiences familiar with traditional Robin Hood lore might be surprised by Sarnoski’s revisionist approach to a familiar hero, examining through pain and violence what it costs to endure a life driven by self-interest.

“It’s my hope in retelling the Robin Hood story that we become more aware of the stories we tell ourselves and often come to take for granted in terms of what they mean and why people told them in the first place,” says Sarnoski. “For those who might claim this isn’t their Robin Hood because he doesn’t conform to their worldview, I hope they can ask themselves, well, why not?”

“In The Death of Robin Hood, I think what we see is a beautiful, very humane portrait of the fullness of Robin’s life,” says Jackman. “The darkness, the regret, the pain, the loss. There’s a cost to the violence, no matter which side you’re on. What is that cost? And is there grace and redemption for someone with those hauntings?”

Reinventing the Legend

In the outer lands of the Celtic fringe, circa 1247 A.D., Robin Hood is an aging recluse, waiting for an end that is long overdue after years of unpaid blood debts. As the film opens, he is a nomadic marauder,
wandering the ravaged land in shell-shocked solitude.

“The Merry Men — if they ever existed — have disbanded, and now Robin is being hunted as a pariah and outlaw, living with the consequences of that life,” says Jackman, who underwent an astonishing physical transformation for the role.

Robin Hood’s status as an altruistic figure has been ingrained in popular culture for centuries, and it’s widely understood that he was likely a composite of several different people. Stories of his legend began
circulating in the oral tradition, coalescing in written form two hundred years later.

The seed of Sarnoski’s bold reimagining traces back to the filmmaker’s boyhood, where legend and lore were passed down to him by the headmaster of the school he attended. A surrogate father of sorts, the
elder figure gave his young ward a copy of the Robin Hood book he had spent his own childhood reading in the 1940s.

Sarnoski quickly fell in love with these canonical stories dating back to the 14th century, but was particularly struck by one — a brief ballad of Robin Hood’s death at the hands of a prioress. The story stuck with him over the years, as it seemed to contrast with traditional notions of the outlaw.
“With all these stories of violence and high adventure, it felt like his end at the priory was this contemplative, quiet experience,” says Sarnoski. “That really fascinated me.”

He was also drawn to the simplistic binary between the two main players that existed in many of the stories focusing on Robin’s death.

“The Prioress is portrayed as this evil, betraying wench, and Robin is the noble one who would never hurt a woman,” says Sarnoski, who began composing the script before he wrote A Quiet Place: Day One.
But what if the roles were reversed, with Robin as the sadistic menace and the Prioress his noble caregiver? Mining the complexity of their dynamic, Sarnoski set out to examine the quiet drama of Robin Hood’s final days in Sister Brigid’s priory bedchamber.

“In the old legends of the death of Robin Hood, I found it interesting that after his life of adventure, he dies quietly in a sunlit church bedroom; there was something unexpected about that,” says Sarnoski.

“I always wanted to pick apart what it might have been like during that time between Robin and the Prioress. She’s always portrayed as this evil figure who kills the benevolent hero. I thought it would be
interesting to flip that and examine their relationship in that quiet room at the end of his life.”

Sarnoski was inspired by two additional sources.

The first was a book called Scotichronicon, an old history of England and Scotland containing a tidbit of some early Robin Hood lore that became disfigured over time. “It basically said, ‘There’s this bandit who all the common folk are really obsessed with telling stories about, but really he’s just a terrible murderer,” says Sarnoski. “That idea intrigued me.”

The Robin Hood of Sarnoski’s film was rooted in this core concept: a hero who is actually a senseless monster. The ethos around this Robin Hood was partially influenced by another source: Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring, a retelling of a fairytale that offers one of the original sources of cinema’s rape-revenge subgenre.

Sarnoski found himself engrossed with the way Bergman took the sacred and the profane and deeply entwined them in his story’s particular time and place. “That was something I wanted to capture
with The Death of Robin Hood — within all these stories there are beautiful and spiritual elements, but also darker and more violent things going on at the same time,” says Sarnoski.

In the opening sequences of The Death of Robin Hood, we meet Robin in the throes of a life governed by fighting and stealing to survive — the antithesis of the hero depicted in contemporary retellings. “He’s gone around for years doing terrible things, recruiting young men and wooing them with fanciful stories of adventure,” says Sarnoski. “But he was using these child soldiers, including Little John, to help him murder and steal. Robin Hood’s ethos is you might as well take what you can get and get out because it’s a dangerous and confusing world.”

Re-emerging in Robin’s life after fifteen years away, Little John finds a grizzled and feral Robin Hood, subsisting at the farthest margins of an already desolate land. Now a grown man, with a wife and daughter, and a new identity obscuring his dark past, John persuades Robin to help him fend off some killers seeking retribution for past violence.

In the brutal world Sarnoski depicts, violence manifests as a specific kind of ugly brutality, where desperate men pulverise their enemies to death.

“I wanted this passage of the story to feel like old bedraggled men trying to kill each other in the mud,” says Sarnoski. “These are people who are willing to do anything to kill their enemies. I wanted
there to be a dirtiness and sloppiness to the violence because these people have been fighting their entire lives.”

After Robin Hood nearly dies in battle, he wakes up in the Priory under the care of Sister Brigid, the very portrait of patient and tender caregiving — worlds removed from Robin’s violent life. The Death of
Robin Hood in its second half adopts a contemplative tone of reconciliation and personal reckoning. During his rehabilitation at the hands of Sister Brigid, Robin comes to see the folly of his wicked ways.
A young man named Arthur (Noah Jupe) arrives wounded, a survivor from Robin’s latest battle who is reluctantly looking to fulfill a blood debt. How Robin responds is complicated by other ghosts of his past
that show him, conversely, a sense of mercy and kindness; he is taken aback by the innocence of Little Margaret (Faith Delaney), another survivor from his exploits that he begins to protect, along with the
friendship with a leper (Bartlett), who treats him with a fearless and enigmatic sense of grace.

“Robin comes to terms with how this violent past of his — and his discovery of peace and love he’s found in the priory — can co-exist in the same person and in the same lifetime,” says Sarnoski. “How he goes
about explaining this to himself — and how he imparts this acceptance to Little Margaret — is what these broken people come to grapple with for the duration of the movie.”

Sarnoski based Sister Brigid in part on Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century German nun who was a medicine woman, writer, composer, and philosopher.

In The Death of Robin Hood, the Prioress is a magnetic healer whose gentleness disarms Robin, helping him to recognise an untapped power within himself. For the first time in his life, he considers the possibility of goodness. “Initially, he sees Sister Brigid as a storyteller who is telling him lies and hiding things about her traumatic past — but Robin comes to see her asa kind of benevolent force,” says Sarnoski. “He recognises that her kind of storytelling, when used responsibly and with love, can help people grow and come to terms with their lives.”

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