12 Most Dark And Twisted Movie Scenes Of 2018

8. The Broom - Robin Hood

Robin Hood has a lot of ideas - some are okay, some are well above its station and some are utterly baffling - and the darkest of all comes when Ben Mendelsohn's Sheriff Of Nottingham (which he plays admirably despite everything) offers some insight into his upbringing within the church system. The film flirts with the idea of the church as a corrupt, amoral institution and there are vague allusions to abuse, but nothing is as overt as when Nottingham tells Robin of Loxley how he was punished as a young boy.

In a scene clearly devised to provoke, Mendelsohn animatedly talks about the violent abuse he and his fellow orphans were subjected to at the hands of their supposed protectors. They were beaten, they were downtrodden and worst of all, they were violated with a broom handle. It's clearly designed to raise a reaction, but it comes out of nowhere and it has no grounding.

So while the material is disturbing, it's the casual exploitation of it in the interest of a cheap reaction that is most troubling. The thread - and indeed any attempt to look at the complexities of Nottingham as a villain - just ends up being dropped as the callous exploitative opportunity it was.

[SG]