First, I have to say, that this movie is a fitting end to the man, the myth and the legend that is Tommy Shelby. Peaky Blinders is one of my favorite television series of all time (probably only bested by my obsession with the German show Dark). Peaky Blinders is so full of texture, anti-heroes, and real villains, that the show always keeps you guessing as to where it’s going to go. But better than that? Is the glorious cinematography, the amazing characters, and phenomenal acting. You just can’t beat this show.
Which is why, when my kids asked me if I wanted to go with them to see it on the big screen? Are you kidding me? Of course the answer was going to be yes. YES! Of course I’m going to say yes. And wow, did this movie not disappoint. I was so worried that Stephen Knight was going to put too much into this 2 hour vial. Try to pack it too full with character studies. Too full with plots, subplots, and surprises, that we wouldn’t have any idea what was going on. But that couldn’t have been more incorrect of me… because this movie was the perfect script. Perfectly balanced character studies. And a perfect balancing act between father and son. So let’s get into it shall we? But caveat emptor… from here on out, there will be spoilers galore.
The Man in Hiding
When we find Tommy Shelby at the start of The Immortal Man, he is not the man who rode away on that white horse at the end of Season 6. That departure was supposed to be a symbolic death and rebirth — the old Tommy, the gangster-politician, the engine of the Shelby empire, burned up with the caravan. What remained was supposed to be something quieter. Something that could rest.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Tommy is in hiding, but the thing he is hiding from isn’t any external enemy with a machine gun, or explosives. It’s the dead. His daughter Ruby, who died young and cursed. His brother John, who never made it out of the gang war years intact. And his mother’s shadow, the matriarch energy that still organizes the Shelby conscience even from beyond the grave. This isn’t abstract grief. In the world of Peaky Blinders, where Romani blood and gypsy second sight have always blurred the line between the living and the dead, Tommy’s ghosts are everpresent. They find him wherever he goes. He has stopped trying to outrun them… and now he spends his time writing a book about his life, in the hopes that this sort of therapy will purge the evil from his soul.
Meanwhile, 1940 has arrived with its own particular horror. The Luftwaffe has begun bombing Birmingham — Small Heath, the heart of Peaky Blinders territory, is catching German ordnance. The BSA factory is hit. The city Tommy spent his whole life fighting over, first to control it, then to improve it, then to leave it, is burning from the sky. And Tommy is somewhere else, trying to be no one.
Duke’s Birmingham
In Tommy’s absence, Erasmus “Duke” Shelby has taken the wheel — and he is driving it hard.
Duke is Tommy’s firstborn, the illegitimate son Tommy only acknowledged late in the series, the young man he whispered something to before disappearing. Whatever Tommy said to him, it seems to have amounted to: this is yours now. Duke has taken it seriously. He runs the Peaky Blinders operation with the swagger and blunt force of someone who has something to prove and no particular interest in restraint.
The operation he’s running is morally indefensible even by Shelby standards: Duke is stealing morphine from the medical supply chains headed to the front lines. Soldiers in the field, wounded and dying, are getting less because Duke is intercepting the stock and selling it. The people of London — already suffering through the chaos of the Blitz, the rationing, the rubble — despise him for it. This isn’t the criminal enterprise of men who were shaped by poverty and war and did what they had to do. This is opportunism with a body count, and everyone can see it.
Ada Shelby, Tommy’s sister, the political conscience of the family, the one Tommy told to run for Parliament at the end of the series… she is watching all of this with mounting fury. She has decided that Duke has gone too far and that someone has to stop him. And if the family won’t do it, she will do it through official channels: Ada begins interviewing witnesses to Duke’s crimes, building a dossier, compiling testimony, preparing to hand the whole package to the police. If she succeeds, Duke will hang.
The Approach: Beckett Makes His Move
Into this situation arrives John Beckett, played by Tim Roth, a man operating in the shadows between British intelligence, criminal enterprise, and Nazi Germany. Beckett approaches Duke with a proposition that sounds, to Duke’s ears, like an opportunity.
The scheme: Nazi Germany has been using Jewish concentration camp labor to manufacture hundreds of millions of counterfeit British pound notes, meticulously produced to be indistinguishable from the real thing. The plan is to flood the British economy with this fake currency, and in effect, collapsing the pound, triggering financial chaos, and delivering an economic knockout blow to the war effort. Britain cannot fight a war if its own money is worthless. Beckett needs someone with the infrastructure and criminal connections to launder this fortune in fake notes into the British financial system. He wants the Peaky Blinders. He wants Duke.
Duke agrees. His reasoning is almost adolescent in its nihilism. He doesn’t care about the British government, doesn’t feel any particular loyalty to the country, doesn’t see why any of it is his problem. He’s been surviving in the margins his whole life. The establishment never did anything for him. Why should he protect it?
Beckett, being a careful man, doesn’t take Duke at his word. He tests him. The test is brutal and direct: Beckett presents a man to Duke, tells him this man is a traitor, and watches to see what Duke does. Duke kills him without much hesitation and handles the body. He passes. The partnership is sealed.
Zelda at the Door
While all of this is unfolding in London, someone finds Tommy at his retreat.
Her name is Zelda. One of twin sisters, the other of whom is dead. Specifically, the other sister is the woman who gave birth to Duke, making Zelda the surviving aunt Duke never knew he had. She arrives at Tommy’s hideaway and comes very close to dying there: Tommy, living like a hunted animal, nearly kills her on instinct before she can speak.
What stops him is what she offers. Zelda carries the gypsy gift. She claims she communicates with her dead twin, and she uses this connection as a bridge to reach the people Tommy is haunted by: his brother, his daughter. In the world of Peaky Blinders, where the supernatural has always been treated as genuinely real rather than metaphorical, this lands. Tommy has been alone with these ghosts for years. Here is someone who can actually speak to them.
They become lovers. And through this intimacy — through Zelda’s access to the dead and her knowledge of Duke, the nephew she shares with Tommy from different angles — Tommy is finally moved to act. Duke is in trouble. Real trouble. The kind that ends with a noose, or worse.
Tommy decides to go to London.
Ada Dies
Before Tommy arrives, the situation in London reaches a catastrophic turning point. Ada’s evidence-gathering has progressed. Beckett knows about it, and he delivers an ultimatum to Duke: she has to go. If Ada submits what she’s compiled to the police, Duke is finished — hanged for his crimes. The only way out is to make sure Ada can’t deliver it. Beckett is telling Duke to kill his own aunt.
But, Duke finds that he just can’t do it. Whatever he is – thief, collaborator, pragmatist with no evident moral ceiling – he cannot kill Ada. She is family in the deepest sense, one of the original Shelbys, one of the people who survived everything. He freezes. And seeing Duke’s failure, Beckett doesn’t freeze… he shoots Ada in the head. And on his way to London, Tommy sees her. Ada, standing dead in the street — another ghost to add to his collection. The man who was trying to retreat from the dead is now carrying one more of them.
The Return to Small Heath
Tommy arrives in London and finds his way to the old pub — the Garrison, or a pub that functions like it, the kind of place that once meant something and now is just a room full of men who resent what the Shelbys became. The reception is hostile. Someone in the crowd challenges him, makes a move. Tommy, without ceremony, drops a grenade down the man’s shirt. The man runs outside and detonates. The message has been received. The pub owner, sufficiently motivated, tells Tommy where he can find Duke.
What follows is not a tender father-son reunion. Tommy and Duke fight — physically, among the pigs, in the mud and the filth, the way Shelbys have always settled the things that matter most. Tommy beats his son senseless. They are covered in mud and blood and there is nothing cinematic about it. But they are both still breathing when it ends, and that means there is still something to say.
The Uneasy Alliance
Zelda is the one who makes the peace. She is the connective tissue — she brings father and son into the same room with something resembling a shared purpose, using her knowledge of both men and her access to the dead to convince Duke that there is still a way through this. That partnering with his father is not submission. That it might be the only thing that saves him.
But Zelda gives Duke something else, too. A bullet. Specifically, a bullet with Tommy’s name on it. Her meaning is clear: work with your father, complete the mission, and then use this when you’re done. Duke accepts it. He tucks it away. The partnership is built on a foundation that includes its own termination clause.
Tommy begins building a plan. He pulls men together, assembles the pieces, starts working the angles on Beckett’s operation. This is what Tommy does — this is the thing he is incapable of stopping doing. The plan is to intercept the counterfeit currency operation, blow the whole scheme apart, keep the fake notes from ever reaching the British economy.
The Betrayal, and the Counter
The problem is that Duke has been feeding Beckett everything. Every piece of Tommy’s plan, every man, every move. Beckett knows what’s coming. By the time Tommy’s operation reaches the river – barges, men, the counterattack – Beckett has already positioned machine guns at the chokepoints. He intends to simply kill everyone on the barges and be done with it. But Tommy’s men have something else up their sleeves. They T-bone the machine gun nest with the barge itself. And the barge happens to be loaded with explosives. The nest goes up, along with the men staffing it, and the tactical situation shifts in an instant.
The Confrontation
Beckett and Duke are together when the plan falls apart. Beckett reads the situation quickly: Duke gave him everything, and it still failed. Which means Duke set him up. Duke turned. Beckett is staring at the man who just buried him.
Beckett tells Duke to do what he’s supposed to do. Kill him, end it, whatever. But before any of that can resolve, Tommy arrives. The machine gun battle that follows is massive. The kind of operatic, everything-on-the-table violence that the show always saved for its most definitive moments. Tommy destroys the counterfeit currency. Everything the Nazis built, every fake note, burns. The economic weapon is gone.
Beckett, in a fury beyond reason, shoots Tommy twice in the gut. Then he gets in a car and drives it straight at him. Tommy, shot and bleeding and standing in the path of a moving vehicle, shoots Beckett in the head. Beckett dies at the wheel. The car still comes. Duke dives and pulls his father out of the way.
The Bullet with His Name On It
Tommy is dying. Two bullets in the gut, with no clean exit from the situation and no particular desire to find one. He has been here before — or somewhere adjacent to it — but this time feels different. This time he doesn’t seem to be looking for the way out.
He convinces Duke to use the bullet.
The conversation around this is not one that gets recounted easily in notes or summaries. But the logic is deeply Shelby: Tommy has been living like a ghost for years, haunted by the people he’s lost, unable to rest, unable to leave. He is not going to recover from this. And if he is going to die – really die, finally – he wants it to be on his own terms. He wants it to come from someone he chose. His son. His heir. He frames it the way the Shelbys have always framed the hardest things — like a horse. When a horse is broken beyond repair, beyond suffering, beyond hope, you don’t let it linger. You do the merciful thing. You end it clean.
Duke uses the bullet.
The Farewell
They carry Tommy out in a gypsy wagon. They set it on fire. It is the same image that ended his old life in Season 6. The caravan burning, the Romani heritage consumed in flame – but this time he is inside it. The funeral pyre of a man who could not be killed by his enemies, who survived tuberculoma lies and car bombs and six seasons of people trying to put him in the ground, who in the end chose the manner and the hand of his own death.
What It All Meant
The title – The Immortal Man – does what good titles do: it means more than one thing. Tommy was immortal in reputation, in cultural weight, in the way no one could actually kill him across thirty-six hours of television. He was immortal in the eyes of his enemies, who came to believe he simply couldn’t be stopped. And he was immortal in his own damage – the WWI trauma, the dead he carried, the way he existed slightly outside of ordinary human time. It was also the name of the book that Tommy completed just before he died. The book being that poetic summation that becomes the show.
The movie is, at its core, a succession story. Duke inherits not just the operation but something harder to name — the burden of being a Shelby, the weight of the name, the knowledge of what it costs. Tommy’s death is also Tommy’s final gift: he gives Duke the cleanest version of an ending he could manage. Not Tommy dying on Beckett’s terms. Not Tommy rotting from the inside. Tommy choosing, one last time.
The white horse that ended Season 6 was a symbol of rebirth. The burning wagon that ends The Immortal Man is the completion of that arc. The rebirth led here. This is what he was reborn into. And now it’s done.
