The age of anxiety and The Death of Robin Hood

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

An enterprising young film student might be well served by examining an apparently developing cinematic tendency: Movies about epic heroes in their crusty, fallen arches years.

The decline-of-the-king trope has been well established (The Fisher King or King Lear, for instance), but that’s different from reimagining what Peter Pan might be like as a grown-up with a swollen prostate, acid reflux and an unfulfilling 9-to-5.

Recent examples of this plot device include Luke Skywalker’s reappearance in the final Star Wars trilogy — especially Episodes VII and VIII — as a grumpy, hermetic Jedi skeptic who chucks his lightsaber in the sea. Then we got Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny — a broken-down divorcee and bereaved father limping half-drunk through his last day as a professor of the ancient world in a world that considers him just as ancient and equally worthless.

Finally, we have The Death of Robin Hood, the 2026 film starring a grizzly Hugh Jackman as the titular rogue. 

Of the tens of thousands of representations of the character across the centuries and all forms of media, this has to rank among the bleakest. We meet Robin in a cave in a crag on a rock-shattered wasteland amid the brutal mini-ice age gripping 13th-century Europe. A young girl — frozen, hungry and desperate — turns up by his fire, and let’s just say the encounter doesn’t end with the mismatched pair sallying forth on a chivalric romp of derring-do that culminates in a reaffirmation of populist justice in an unjust world.

This Robin puts the “hood” in “hoodlum.” He’s not just a seasoned killer, he’s an entire spice rack of murderous expertise, and bluntly states that all the tales of his epic deeds and romantic exploits are just that: gloss on a lifetime of crime and wanton savagery. 

(And, because this film came from the A24 studio — whose offerings include The VVitch, The Lighthouse, Hereditary, Civil War and a host of other acclaimed, visceral, gritty modern masterpieces — it’s emphatically wanton and savage in parts.) 

Around the time we see the title card, Robin has buried the girl in what appears to be his personal cemetery, filled with the bodies of others who’ve tried and failed to get the drop on him. Then he’s back on the move for an eventual reunion with Little John (Bill Skarsgård), who quickly reveals himself to be a brutish enforcer whose obvious traumatic brain injuries and PTSD have made it impossible to settle down with a wife and child to farm as a decent medieval Christian. John’s outlaw ways have landed him in big trouble, and he needs Robin’s help on what he calls “one last adventure.” It’s more of a family feud-turned-massacre (in which he’s pretty obviously the bad guy) that results in Robin grievously wounded and on the lam. 

John brings his old captain to a remote island where a prioress (Jodie Comer) is rumored to have mystical powers of healing, and that’s really where the story begins.

And it’s a story about a story. That is, Robin Hood the man — the ruthless, near-nihilistic, blood-stained and scarred villain of a thousand outrages — confronts Robin Hood the character: a hero invented out of unearned valor and existing only in the minds and motives of those who tell his tales.

Robin, who calls himself Randolph while in convalescent hiding, wants nothing more than to escape his past and shed his legend along with his life. “I’m tired,” he says, but neither the realities nor fictions of his life are done with him, as he finds it increasingly impossible to hide either from the prioress, the daughter of John (Faith Delaney) and the anonymous leper who all live on the sanctuary island.

It’s a redemption story but not a tidy one, filled with lies, betrayals and sacrifices that carry the highest of prices. 

Why we’re interested in seeing these types of iconic heroes — all white men deep in the transition from virulence and competence to obsolescence — struggle through the conflicted twilight of their lives is for that enterprising young film student to explore. However, a decent working thesis might be that we’re resonating as audiences with the feeling that long accepted triumphal narratives extolling the binary systems of good and evil, might and right, vigor and optimism versus decline and pessimism are breaking apart.

Ours is an age of anxiety and, certainly demographically, we have a particular anxiety about age.

Viewed in that way, it tracks that Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones and Robin Hood should deconstruct and disappear. That might clear the way for new heroes; it might not. But, in the case of The Death of Robin Hood, it’s a welcome, well imagined complication of the quintessential people’s criminal with a heart maybe not of gold, but at least a heart.

Rent it on Amazon Prime.