Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Death of Robin Hood
2026 · Michael Sarnoski · The Death of Robin Hood on Sightlines
Somewhere around the middle of the film, the picture gets smaller. The wide anamorphic frame of the opening section, built for raids and open country and gray weather coming off the Mourne Mountains, pulls in at the sides and settles into the narrower 1.66:1 frame of the priory. Robin Hood has been badly wounded. He can't ride and he can't fight. The screen seems to have been injured along with him.
That shift in the frame is Michael Sarnoski's central idea, and it is a good place to bring in Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze treated the frame as a closed set, a system that decides what can happen inside it. A widescreen frame is a world with room to act in. It has horizons to cross, enemies coming from the edges and space for a body to throw itself into. When Sarnoski and his cinematographer Pat Scola narrow it, they don't just change the look of the film. They take away the space in which Robin Hood used to be Robin Hood.
This matters because the old Robin Hood belongs to what Deleuze called the action-image. That is the cinema of the sensory-motor circuit: a hero sees a situation, the situation presses on him, and he acts to change it. The Robin Hood of Fairbanks and Flynn is a pure example. Something is wrong in Nottingham, an arrow flies, and the wrong is put right. The first half of Sarnoski's film still runs on that engine, though it is running down. Robin and Little John (Bill Skarsgård) go on a raid to win back a friend's stolen farm. It's a small injustice and a small act of justice, the large form of the action-image at village scale. And it costs him. The act puts the hero in a sickbed.
Deleuze's name for this is the crisis of the action-image: the point where characters can no longer respond adequately to what they see, and the chain from seeing to doing breaks. Deleuze traced that crisis to postwar cinema. Sarnoski places it inside a single body. Robin's crisis is moral as well as physical. The film is confessional in mode: it is about a man defined by killing who has to ask whether there is anything else to him. A man of action who can't act anymore has only one thing left to do, and that is look.
This is the figure Deleuze called the seer: someone who watches and endures rather than intervenes. The priory half is built around him. A sickroom, a cloister, and a slow negotiation between a dying man and the people tending him, Jodie Comer's Sister Brigid and an orphaned girl. Andrew Mondshein's editing deliberately favors duration and stillness over momentum, and here it reaches what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations. These are stretches where nothing moves the plot forward and a scene is simply experienced. In Deleuze's terms this is dead time. Critics argued about it. Admirers called it gravity and detractors called it inertia. Both groups were describing the same thing, a film that has stopped converting what it sees into action. Whether that feels like a weight or a release is the question the film puts to you.
The face is where that question gets settled. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up in which a feeling is registered but not yet turned into action, and he treated Ingmar Bergman as the great filmmaker of the face. Sarnoski has confirmed that Bergman's The Virgin Spring was an influence, and you can see it in the fog and the careful framing. On Pig, Scola and Sarnoski had already learned to hold faces in near-darkness with shallow focus. Here they hold Hugh Jackman's, buried under Charlotte Betts' prosthetics until he is nearly unrecognizable, so that what is left is the eyes. David Ehrlich singled them out, and he was right to. Grierson saw both ferocity and "sufficient sorrow" in the same body. That double reading is the affection-image doing its work. The violence of the first half hasn't gone anywhere. It is still there in the face as a feeling with no outlet.
The color follows the same arc as the frame. It starts bleak and gray, then warms at the priory.
The lineage shows what Sarnoski is doing with genre. Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven are the elegiac westerns in which men of violence outlive their usefulness, and they are the action-image watching itself grow old. Robin and Marian had already brought the ballad home to die, with a deathbed reckoning as its structure. Sarnoski's addition is formal. Sarnoski closes the frame on the old circuit. It's the method of Pig, where a revenge-thriller premise is set up and the promised violence held back. The same method runs through A Quiet Place: Day One, a terminally ill protagonist's inner life kept at human scale inside a genre spectacle. Jim Ghedi's folk score, with its occasional bellowed vocals, goes along with this. It sounds like the ballads that turned Robin into a legend, sung at the bedside of the man.
The Death of Robin Hood doesn't overturn cinema. Its significance is smaller and more exact than that. It shows that the move Deleuze described, from a cinema of acting to a cinema of seeing, can still be staged as a drama, inside a single hero and halfway through a single film, and that a change of aspect ratio can carry that move. Robin Hood is public domain, so anyone could have made one more adventure out of him. Sarnoski made a film about what remains when the adventure is over.
When you watch it, notice the moment the frame narrows. Then look at what Robin does with all the action that no longer has anywhere to go. Most of it ends up in his eyes.
Concepts in play
- Crisis of the action-image — The raid with Little John to win back a friend's stolen farm resolves nothing and leaves Robin gravely wounded, unable to act and forced into a moral reckoning with a life defined by killing.
- The frame (closed set) — The mid-film change from 2.39:1 anamorphic (Ultra Panatar II) to 1.66:1 spherical (Primos) as the story moves to the priory. The frame itself shrinks the world in which action is possible.
- Action-image, large form (in decline) — The first half's violent raids and open country follow the old situation-to-act pattern of the Robin Hood legend, scaled down to a single stolen farm, and they fail.
- The seer (voyant) — Immobilized at the priory, Robin is reduced to watching and enduring the care of Sister Brigid and the orphaned girl rather than acting.
- Dead time (temps mort) — Mondshein's editing deliberately favours duration and stillness over momentum in the convalescent half, which critics read as either gravity or inertia.
- Pure optical and sound situations — The sickroom and cloister scenes are lived through rather than acted on, with Ghedi's folk score and quiet used expressively rather than as connective tissue.
- Affection-image (the close-up) — Jackman's face, nearly unrecognizable under Charlotte Betts' prosthetics and held in near-darkness and shallow focus, with critics singling out his eyes. Ferocity and sorrow are 'legible in the same body', a feeling with no discharge into action. Bergman (The Virgin Spring) is a confirmed influence.