Blood, Mud, and Retribution: Michael Sarnoski's "The Death of Robin Hood" Deconstructs a Folk Hero
We have spent centuries dressing Robin Hood in Lincoln green and righteous virtue. He's the rogue who robs the rich to feed the needy—a champion of the common folk laughing in the face of tyranny. But what we often forget is that legends are porous, fragile things, easily twisted into perverse nightmares depending on who survives to tell the tale next. In Michael Sarnoski’s "The Death of Robin Hood," the velvet of myth is violently stripped away, leaving only the blood-soaked mud of 13th-century England and a man drowning in the consequences of his own personally curated mythology. If you have seen the marketing for this A24 release, you might expect two unbroken hours of kinetic, limb-severing chaos. Sarnoski, however, possesses a much more sophisticated compass. He understands that light and dark must hold each other in a perilous equilibrium. What he has crafted is a film of two distinct, staggering halves: a descent into a ferocious hell, followed by an agonizing, slow-burn crawl toward a semblance of grace.
Create Your Own Website With Webador