Yes, the movie answers the burning question: Tommy Shelby dies at the end of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. The film drops Cillian Murphy’s gangster back into the chaos of the Birmingham Blitz, where a Nazi scheme and some family drama lead to a brutal, emotional finish.

Why Tommy comes back

Tommy has been hiding out in a country house, trying to forget the blood on his hands. Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson) finds him and offers a bargain: return to Birmingham, save his son Duke (Barry Keoghan), and she and her sister will help him find peace. That is the setup that drags him back into the Peaky business.

The Nazi plot and the plan to stop it

Duke is running the Peaky Blinders now, and he has gotten mixed up with a Nazi plan to flood Britain with forged banknotes. If it worked, the counterfeit money would seriously undermine the war effort. The team plots to blow up a Liverpool warehouse full of the fake currency. Along the way, there are ugly scenes: Ada (Sophie Rundle) is executed by Nazi agent Beckett (Tim Roth), and Tommy and Duke have a rough, muddy fight on a pig farm before they start to work together.

The final showdown

The raid mostly succeeds and the fake cash is destroyed. Some Nazi soldiers are killed during the chaos. Beckett tries to escape by car, driving straight at Tommy and shooting him twice in the stomach. Tommy shoots Beckett in the head, but the stomach wounds are mortal. Kaulo’s plan had a darker twist: she expected that in the fog of battle Duke would be the one to kill Tommy, giving him the so-called peace Kaulo promised.

Tommy, badly wounded, tells Duke to put him out of his misery, saying, "I am a horse. You'd do it for a horse." Duke ends up shooting Tommy with a bullet engraved with his name. Tommy’s final moments include a flash of memory and the line, "In the bleak midwinter..." Kaulo’s promise is fulfilled, just not in the comforting way it sounded.

What happens next

  • Tommy’s friends and family burn his body in a red Gypsy carriage, following Gypsy ritual.
  • Kaulo gives Duke the unfinished book Tommy was writing, titled The Immortal Man. The narration in the film reads like part of Tommy’s will.
  • Duke inherits leadership of the Peaky Blinders.
  • The film leaves the door open for more stories. Two new seasons set in the 1950s have been mentioned, which could follow the next generation of Shelbys.

So there it is: Tommy gets the peace he was promised, thanks to a plan that involved a Nazi plot, a blown-up warehouse, and his own son pulling the final trigger. It is grim, tidy, and very much the end of Tommy Shelby’s arc in this film.