Director: Michael Sarnoski
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Murray Bartlett
Earlier this year, Nazi tech mogul Elon Musk dallied with becoming the world’s first trillionaire, a level of extreme wealth both mystifying and sickening. Disparities of class and economic standing across the globe are growing wider, and anti-billionaire sentiment only grows among the less fortunate (that’ll be the most of us). So it’s a strange time for Michael Sarnoski, director of Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One, to choose to go against this tide of feeling by ‘demystifying’ the Robin Hood legend, recasting the British folk hero – known for robbing from the rich to give to the poor – as a pitiless rapist, pillager, murderer and general scourge of the 13th century countryside.
Robin Hood is a figure who keeps cutting a swath through the story of cinema, mostly fondly recalled in giddy escapist pictures. Errol Flynn’s dandyish incarnation, or Disney’s toe-tapping ’70s iteration. Of late, efforts to recast him as a gruff and gritty tortured hero have been, at best, forgettable (sorry Ridley, it’s one of your worst pictures). Sarnoski seems determined to go several steps further, borrowing the mercilessly dreary colour palette favoured by Robert Eggers (where a daylight scene amounts to a jumpscare) and having Hugh Jackman glower his way through an entire act of thunderingly borish, savage violence to hammer his point home. With his psychopathic partner in crime Little John (Bill Skarsgård), Robin is showcased as wholly detached from humanity, a Herzogian wildman robbed of all notions of heroism, addicted to inflicting pain. It’s a grayscale chore, and by the time a child appears with an arrow shot through the back of his head piercing his eye The Death of Robin Hood has already achieved self-parodying levels of lumpen misery porn.
Some rather dramatic shots of buildings ablaze at night aside, this first third of Sarnoski’s film is punishing to sit through. Excessively, egregiously bleak, harsh, morose and deathly dull, with not a scratch of nuance to be found. It makes Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising (which I actually like) seem subdued and subtle. Folks, I was tempted to cut my losses and walk out. But then things changed.
Having been near-fatally wounded, Robin awakes from six days unconscious at the Priory of St. Clement, an island sanctuary for convalescence where the weak and invalid are tended to by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer). Thank the heavens for Comer’s efforts, not in slowly nursing our wretched Robin, but in bringing her trusted level of nous to proceedings. Rhapsodising of balance over time and the power of language, Brigid provides a pivotal counterweight to the unrelenting grimness, though Comer isn’t utilised as well as she could have been. A sexually conflicted sequence in Brigid’s sage-burning masturbation cave feels entirely out of place. A peeking Robin as confused as Sarnoski as to what to do with this information.
With daylight cracking into the movie, you can sense the opportunity for change. Murray Bartlett provides arguably the finest performance of all as a Leper who has made St. Clement his home. Once Robin is back on his feet he guides him through the orchards, as though preparing to handover his role there. But Sarnoski pulls back from the expected route. This is staunchly not a redemption story, and the wronged seeking vengeance are never far from the movie’s thoughts. And so it trudges onward. Robin – going by the pseudonym Randolph out of shame and reticence – is mean even as he is merciful, regards his followers as fools and, when he does finally breathe his own name, it comes out like an apology, albeit an insincere one. The Joan of Arc-esque goodness of Comer’s Brigid – in all senses and as unilaterally without shade – only underscores the dragging portentousness (and pretentiousness) of what surrounds her.
Sarnoski has dug his heels in here and, if it had paid off, there’d be something admirable in that. This is a stubborn film, committed to a brow-beaten slowness that I’d ordinary have welcomed were they much to cling onto. Sadly, there isn’t. It’s hard to emphasise how much goodwill is swiftly whittled away in that opening half hour. One might argue it’s too successful. By the time we’re marooned at the priory (where the film fully sits down), the impetus to care has been pummelled out of us. Myths, by their very nature, are distorting things. The truth in them flickers like a guttering candle flame. And there’s an argument for sure that some of Britain’s catalogue of folktales could use a little more examination; are mines to be plundered for original thought.
The Death of Robin Hood doesn’t come across as though it has achieved anything, however. It’s a joyless, incredibly tone-deaf work that cuts close to punishment, and the score below is only as high as it is thanks to the recognition that, yes, dire as it may be, the production crew have worked hard to render it so, Lorna Marie Mugan’s costume work being particularly fine.
And because, goddamn it, that is a pretty good death scene, after all.
The Lost Highway Hotel 