When a long-running TV show continues or concludes with a big-budget movie, the results are often for fans only. If there’s a new X-Files movie, and you never watched the last four seasons of The X-Files, you might be a little curious about what Mulder and Scully are up to these days — or a little wary about getting lost amidst all those episodes you missed.
The same goes for the new Peaky Blinders movie, The Immortal Man, which caps off at least this chapter of the long-running crime drama. A staple of Netflix and BBC programming for over a decade, the show follows the saga of the Shelby family and the Peaky Blinders gang throughout 1920s and ’30s England. If you haven’t watched Peaky Blinders, you’re already six seasons and roughly 15 years behind when the film begins.
Netflix users still might be curious anyway. The company has put a lot of its ample marketing weight behind the film — which makes sense for the latest project starring Academy Award winner Cillian Murphy, plus Oscar nominees like Tim Roth and Barry Keoghan, along with Rebecca Ferguson and Stephen Graham. And the calculus on streaming is always different from in the movie theater. To watch that theoretical X-Files movie, you’d have to spend $10 or more on a ticket to a theater. To try Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man all you have to do is click a couple buttons on your TV remote.
Should Peaky neophytes give the film a shot without watching the series? Here’s what someone who’s seen the movie but almost none of the show (me, I’m talking about me) thinks.
What Is Peaky Blinders?
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Based on these press photos, you might think that Peaky Blinders is a show about Cillian Murphy wearing great clothes and walking dramatically towards the camera with his head down.
You would not be wrong! That is definitely a part of Peaky Blinders’ appeal. But there is more to the concept than that. The show is a sprawling gangster epic that explores the world of post-World War I England through the eyes of Murphy’s Tommy Shelby, the powerful leader of the Peaky Blinders gang of Birmingham. Tommy and his family — including brother Arthur (Paul Anderson) and aunt Polly (Helen McCrory) — form the nucleus of gang’s leadership. While the show is a crime drama, its historical setting also allows it to examine other subjects, including politics, policing, and religion.
What is The Immortal Man?
Netflix and the BBC released six seasons of Peaky Blinders between 2013 and 2022. Actors came and went on the show — a lot of characters die along the way, as it known to happen on television series about violent gangsters — but Murphy remained a constant across all nine years. After the last batch of episodes, Murphy insisted he would be willing to return to the Tommy Shelby character for the right project. (Murphy won his Best Actor Academy Award a little over a year after the final season of Peaky Blinders aired.)
Instead of a seventh Peaky Blinders season, creator Steven Knight wrote a movie, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. The film is directed by Tom Harper, who also helmed the final three episodes of Peaky Blinders’ first series.
Murphy returns in The Immortal Man as Tommy, along with several other veteran Peaky Blinders cast members, but most of the key characters in the film are played by newcomers to the franchise, including Barry Keoghan, Rebecca Ferguson, and Tim Roth. (The meaning of the subtitle is explained by one of the characters, but I won’t spoil who or how.)
The Immortal Man is set in 1940, several years after Season 6 of Peaky Blinders, and sees Tommy and the Peaky Blinders getting dragged into World War II after the Germans bomb their hometown of Birmingham and a Nazi sympathizer (played by Roth) plots to destroy the British economy with counterfeit currency.
What Do You Need to Know Before the Movie?
Not much! If you know Peaky Blinders is a story about mid-20th-century British gangsters starring Cillian Murphy, that’s basically enough. Certain plot twists will surely mean more to longtime Peaky Blinders viewers than they will someone who hasn’t followed the show for six seasons, but The Immortal Man does a good job of introducing the characters for newcomers, and explaining their connections to one another. The motivations and relationships between the characters are all totally clear.
Those who haven’t watched the show will miss certain details, like the ways in which The Immortal Man mirrors the imagery and events of the Peaky Blinders pilot, and they’ll likely be a little confused by some elements, like the meaning and symbolic importance of the repeated phrase “in the bleak midwinter.” But these things are easily Google-able afterwards.
Honestly, I think it’s probably more important to watch with subtitles (so you can fully understand the dialogue, some of which is spoken through thick accents) than to have previously seen Peaky Blinders. And on Netflix, it’s extremely easy to do that.
How Do You Watch Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man?
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is already playing in limited release in some movie theaters. It debuts on Netflix worldwide on March 20.
That’s how you watch it. Should you watch it? As someone who had only seen a handful of episodes prior to The Immortal Man, I would say yes. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed the movie, and how rarely I was lost.
And again, the film is going to be on Netflix. If you’ve already got a subscription, you have almost nothing to lose. If the first few moments don’t grab you, switch back to Joe’s College Road Trip.
I think it’s more likely you’ll watch the film, enjoy it, and then get curious about the Peaky Blinders TV series. Which is probably one of the reasons Netflix greenlit the film in the first place.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
