What is it with Australians and Robin Hood? Errol Flynn was from Tasmania. Russell Crowe, who played the role for Ridley Scott, grew up in Sydney. Now, Hugh Jackman takes on the part for an (initially, anyway) manure-soaked interpretation from the director of Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One. I guess folk from that part of the world understand the outdoor life.

You will hardly need to be told that Michael Sarnoski’s film is in the revisionist camp. Given how most filmmakers now approach the character, the really brave move would be to have him wear a feathered bycocket hat while dancing to Alan-a-Dale’s lute. There is none of that here. The Death of Robin Hood begins with a storm and gets gradually more miserable. Sarnoski’s own script, loosely inspired by the anonymous 17th-century ballad Robin Hood’s Death, makes it clear early on that almost everything we have heard about the supposed hero is a lie.

It is 1247 and the ageing Robin, a self-serving thief and murderer, is forever fending off revenge attacks from relations of those he has slain. Further echoes of the past reverberate when Little John (Bill Skarsgård) asks for help to reclaim his farm from the family who have taken it over. To say the ensuing battle is brutal is to understate the case. Here is a film that will not hesitate to put an arrow through a child’s head. The nihilistic embrace of an animalistic past is on a par with that in Aleksei German’s famously horrible 2013 sci-fi allegory Hard to be a God. Mud and blood are swilled by the bucket.

Pat Scola, who also shot the persuasively mordant Pig for Sarnoski, revels in the half-light and the quarter-darkness. Nobody familiar with Fair Head on a squally day will be surprised to hear the film was shot in Northern Ireland. Nottinghamshire, the traditional home of Robin Hood, cannot pretend to this level of ruthless beauty.

There is a sense of the world coming to a desperate end. Which it nearly does. After the fighting is over, an injured Robin awakes under the care of nuns in the starkly attractive Priory of St Clement. His most conspicuous carer, coiffured for the cover of a 1968 singer-songwriter album, is Jodie Comer as the endlessly patient Sr Bridget.

The contrast between the film’s opening third, and what turns out to be the main body is perhaps too striking. After an extended period of skulls being split, we are now at home to spluttering candles, quiet crop tending and the contemplation of eternity. Robin is thrown among puzzling recluses such as a leper (Murray Bartlett, unrecognisable from his role as the resort manager from series one of The White Lotus) who, we suspect, may have connections with Robin’s violent prehistory. The jarring shift from hyper-action to medieval reverie may explain why, on its US release, The Death of Robin Hood received decidedly mixed reviews. It asks for a leap of faith.

The interactions between Jackman and Comer are, however, nicely judged in their skirting of awkward truths. As the film progresses, it becomes clear we are heading to an engagement with the comfort of myth and the guilty pleasures of historical reinvention. Those ideas play out in a touching late speech that, nudging aside the film’s earlier longueurs, unexpectedly returns the audience to the innocence of the Errol Flynn version.

No, we don’t need another revisionist Robin Hood film, but Sarnoski makes the case that, if properly realised, such a thing may still pass the time pleasurably. Those queasy about on-screen violence should, nonetheless, approach with appropriate caution.

In cinemas from August 4th