‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’ Review: Tommy Shelby Gets Pulled Back In

Full disclosure: I never watched the Peaky Blinders series. It started at a time when I was being more selective with TV, and unlike many other shows, I never managed to circle back to it. I mention this because the emotional investment in Tommy Shelby’s story (Cillian Murphy) will probably be very different for anyone who followed his misadventures over six seasons. That’s not my case. Still, The Immortal Man is a very good film. I imagine it might be even more so for fans. Or maybe not—who knows. Fans are an increasingly strange breed these days.

While you definitely gain a lot from having seen the show—there’s no doubt about that—The Immortal Man is designed to be understood by newcomers as well. Partly because of how far removed it is from the rest of the series in terms of time (seven years), and partly because the characters involved are fairly specific to this story. But also because Steven Knight’s script makes an effort to give viewers the information they need to connect the dots. It’s not always done in the most inventive way—Tommy’s voiceover, dreams, the occasional flashback, hallucinations, that sort of thing—but the film also doesn’t obsess over making sure you know absolutely everything that happened before.

The movie opens with the Nazis—of all things—putting together a plan to win the war financially rather than militarily. They’re using Jewish prisoners to counterfeit millions upon millions of pounds at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (the plan, called “Operation Bernhard,” did exist in real life, though in 1942, not 1940 as it’s presented here). The idea is to flood the British economy with fake currency and bring the country to its knees. What they need is a network of local contacts to circulate the money in England. And where better than the turbulent streets of Birmingham?

Tim Roth plays Beckett, the man tasked with carrying out that plan. But to make it work he needs gangsters capable of moving money through the black market. Enter the Peaky Blinders, still active and now led by Duke Shelby (Barry Keoghan), Tommy’s illegitimate son. Duke is estranged from his father and, right from the start, proves himself just as reckless and violent as Tommy once was. Naturally, none of the plans involve the old man himself: Tommy is living practically in isolation, writing his memoirs in a house far removed from the world.

But just as Michael Corleone once said, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” the same thing happens to Tommy. Two people from his life reappear: Zelda (Rebecca Ferguson), a woman tied to his past, and his sister Ada (Sophie Rundle). They know about what’s going on and ask him to intervene. But Tommy is busy licking the wounds of his past mistakes and misdeeds, more inclined to wrestle with them in solitude than to return to action. Steven Knight and director Tom Harper take almost half the film to pull him out of those quiet pastures. And from that point on, mates, Peaky Blinders turns into the mix of suspense, espionage, action, and Shakespearean family drama everyone came to see.

Led by a reflective and patient Cillian Murphy—at least at first—the cast of The Immortal Man gives the film an added sense of gravity. The rivalry here becomes triangular: beyond Tommy’s conflict with Beckett and Beckett’s with Duke, there’s also the father-son tension, which ultimately becomes the central and most dramatic thread of the story. They’re not throwing grenades at each other or shooting bullets or trapping one another in explosions. But a physical confrontation and a series of intense dramatic scenes between them end up feeling heavier and more impactful than any gunfire.

In the middle of it all is the legacy of the gang. Duke wants it for himself, while Tommy wants nothing more to do with it. The problem is that Tommy has changed, and he no longer believes the Peaky Blinders should operate the way they once did. That tension drives one of the story’s main conflicts, since Tommy seems convinced his son lacks the wisdom to lead the gang properly—his temperament is closer to that of Tommy’s brother Arthur. The question is whether that can change.

That moral and emotional journey runs parallel to—though ultimately becomes more important than—the counterfeit-pounds plot and the Nazis behind it. Tim Roth’s Beckett is a somewhat more theatrical villain than the film’s otherwise solemn tone might suggest (at one point he suddenly shouts “Heil fucking Hitler!” out of nowhere). Keoghan is, luckily, more restrained than usual, and the excellent Rebecca Ferguson, despite having relatively few scenes, becomes central to the drama: an enigmatic Lady Macbeth figure playing both sides between Tommy and Duke, always seemingly looking to gain something for herself. Or maybe not. Maybe all she really wants is peace within the family.

Dark, slow-moving but charged with intensity, Harper’s film keeps the visual palette, tone, and rhythm of the series. It also continues the tradition of using covers and songs by bands whose style fits the show’s aesthetic. Here we get yet another version of Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” along with covers or new takes on songs by groups like Massive Attack and Lankum, plus original compositions by Grian Chatten (Fontaines D.C.) and Amy Taylor (Amyl and the Sniffers). All of it contributes to giving The Immortal Man the—perhaps slightly overblown—sense of gravity it tries to sustain from beginning to end.

This is hardly a massive blockbuster. If anything, it feels like a double-length final episode with a few special guests, and that’s perfectly fine. The Immortal Man doesn’t try to be an epic conclusion to a series that began thirteen years ago. Instead, it plays more like a farewell —emotional, intense, maybe even a little painful— while leaving the door open for a possible reunion down the road. In an era where everyone survives by leaning on recognizable IP, nobody is going to waste a brand as strong as Peaky Blinders. After all, if they managed to make those century-old tweed flat caps fashionable again, they can probably do it once more whenever they feel like it.