This “Robin Hood” transitions into contemplative, philosophical registers while never slacking in suspense. It is, at its core, a redemption story, simple in persuasive ways yet richly complicated by difficult personalities and atrocious revelations. Coincidences that would seem narratively convenient in lesser narratives are imbued with a classical feeling of fate.

[Michael Sarnoski's] latest isn’t deep enough or captivating enough to make the same impact as his previous movies, but it’s a mature work that makes a valid point, and Hugh Jackman gives an excellent lead performance.

The Death of Robin Hood isn’t revisionist history — it’s a history of revisionism. One that fittingly creeps further into fiction with every claim it makes towards “the truth,” as Sarnoski’s ultra-austere effort to cut through a millennium of myths can’t help but create a hard-to-swallow fable of its own along the way.

The brooding pace and relative silence that characterize writer-director Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood is more evocative of his standout debut film Pig than it is his far more mainstream A Quiet Place: Day One, making this elegiac but brutal period piece his most niche and least accessible film yet. Still, its heady mix of mournful drama and murderous action certainly distinguish it from the litany of other Robin Hood films in existence.

The Death of Robin Hood holds our attention for the sheer severity of its reinvention, the rooted, hessian-rough vividness of its ruined world, and its earnest, complex preoccupation with matters of the soul — a vanishingly rare virtue in the multiplex in general, let alone in the realm of endlessly repurposed IP.