“Who the f*ck is Tommy Shelby?” That’s the question hanging over the opening moments of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, and honestly, it’s one the man himself seems to be struggling with. Set six years after the series finale, this feature-length spin-off finds the iconic gangster in a state of self-imposed exile, holed up in a crumbling mansion, smoking opium, and typing out his memoirs. The trauma of the First World War still haunts him, and when his sister Ada arrives with news of a new family death and a rising threat in Birmingham, Tommy’s response is chillingly detached: “I have a war of my own inside my head.”
But crime, as they say, abhors a vacuum. In Tommy’s absence, the Peaky Blinders have reformed under a new, terrifying leader: his illegitimate son, Duke, played with feral intensity by Barry Keoghan. Duke is everything his father was in his prime—ruthless, ambitious, and brutal—but without the flicker of conscience that sometimes stayed Tommy’s hand. He’s running the streets like “it’s 1919 all over again,” a direct callback to the gang’s postwar origins, and creating a major problem for Ada, who is now a Member of Parliament trying to clean up the city.
The plot kicks into gear when Duke is approached by Tim Roth’s Beckett, a treasurer for the British Union of Fascists who is collaborating with the Nazis to destabilize the UK economy by flooding it with counterfeit money. The price for Duke’s cut? He must assassinate his aunt Ada. This sets the stage for the film’s core conflict: a father-son drama with Oedipal overtones, wrapped in a race against time to stop a national treason.
Director Tom Harper and writer Steven Knight smartly avoid getting bogged down in series lore. While familiar faces return and Nick Cave’s iconic “Red Right Hand” makes a subtle, welcome reappearance, The Immortal Man functions perfectly as a standalone story. Its themes of family, legacy, trust, and betrayal are universal, and the wartime 1940s setting gives it a distinct pulp adventure feel, reminiscent of classic boys’ own comics, with even a dash of Sergio Leone-style tension in its final confrontation.
The film truly belongs to Cillian Murphy. After embodying Tommy Shelby for over a decade across 36 episodes, Murphy finds new shades to the character here. This is a Tommy worn down by grief, guilt, and opium, but Murphy brings a raw, unexpected emotionality to his performance. The memoir device—seeing Tommy tap away at his typewriter even on a moving barge—might verge on the absurd, but it serves to highlight a man trying, and perhaps failing, to make sense of his own myth.
His eventual return to the fray, spurred by a psychic Romany woman named Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson), is a masterclass in subdued power. The moment he walks back into the Garrison Tavern, half the patrons don’t even recognize him, making the eventual re-emergence of “the” Tommy Shelby all the more potent. His uneasy alliance and subsequent brutal brawl with Duke—a fight memorably staged in a pigsty—is the gritty, emotional heart of the film.
For fans, it’s a satisfying, handsome extension of the world they love, comfortable in its grimy, stylish violence. For newcomers, it’s an accessible entry point into a rich narrative about damaged men and the legacies they destroy and create. In the end, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man isn’t trying to reinvent the razor-blade cap. It’s a well-crafted piece of British pulp that knows exactly what it is: a story about whether a father can save his son from becoming a monster, or if he’s already too late. And with Murphy at the helm, it wears that cap very well indeed.
