🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
Heart of Stone superspy Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) is a master of deception. When we first meet her, she’s deep undercover as a member of a British MI6 team on a mission — a spy fooling other spies. Her colleagues in espionage have no clue that the woman they believe to be a baby agent with no experience in the field is actually working for the Charter, an international group of elite spies who rely on a one-of-a-kind AI known as the Heart to keep the peace. When the MI6 team is tasked with finding and apprehending the dangerous hacker Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), Stone’s dual allegiances merge into one objective: protect the Heart from anyone who might threaten it.
As it turns out, Stone isn’t the only one with a hidden agenda. Let’s dig in: Stone and her MI6 team head to Lisbon, where they are ambushed by a kill squad hired to take them out. After a breakneck car chase through the European city’s ancient streets, Stone is forced to reveal her true identity. After all, no first-time agent lacking field experience drives a car like that. “I wish I could have told you,” she says in response to her MI6 colleagues’ bemused and betrayed faces. But, she continues, “We all want the same thing.” That’s when Parker (Jamie Dornan) calmly pulls his gun. “No, we don’t,” he says, murdering his two partners in cold blood before taking aim at Stone. “You’re not the only one with a secret,” he tells her. And that secret turns out to be a doozy. He hasn’t been trying to stop Keya –– he’s been working with her to gain access to the Heart in order to expose the Charter and their grip on humanity’s data.
During a meeting of the Four Kings — the commanders of the Charter known by the aliases King of Diamonds (Glenn Close), King of Hearts (Stone’s boss Nomad, played by Sophie Okonedo), King of Clubs (BD Wong), and King of Spades (Mark Ivanir) — Parker’s motives are finally revealed. A career operative born in Belfast, he was radicalized in December 2015 after a black ops operation in Chechnya went sideways: Parker and his team were ambushed while delivering a convoy of weapons to help take out a vicious warlord; the King of Clubs gave the order for a drone strike on the area, leaving him to die. MI6 buried any record of the mission… until now.
“I didn’t see it coming,” Dornan told Tudum in June about reading his character’s big twist in the script. “I was as shocked as anyone.” That reaction is what compelled Dornan to take on the role, which allowed him to play two almost completely different characters: the charming Parker we meet early in the film and the ice-cold villain he morphs into nearly halfway through.
“My approach [was] to treat them almost separately,” said the actor. “What was attractive about Parker is we think he’s this stand-up guy who’s really great at his job and hopefully comes across as charming and winning, a big team player –– and it makes it all the more shocking to reveal that he is not who you think he is and there’s ulterior motives. He’s extremely dangerous.”
Dornan continued: “I love playing with the audience’s perception of someone, leading them down a path thinking that you’re presenting this version of someone and actually they turn out to be something altogether different. I always think that’s interesting.”
Heart of Stone marks Indian cinema superstar Bhatt’s Hollywood debut. In June, she told Tudum that, like Dornan, she loved the idea of playing a character who challenges expectations. “I did enjoy the antagonist part,” she said. “I will not lie.”
But Keya doesn’t become Stone’s ally overnight. At first, she believes that she and Parker are teaming up to tell the world about the Heart’s power. She wants to use the technology to expose the truth about her past: Her parents were killed in a botched drug trial led by a pharmaceutical billionaire named Karche, who then took the orphaned Keya in and trained her to become a hacker. But once the two bring the stolen technology to an Icelandic bunker and bring it online, Parker reveals his true aim: to kill the Four Kings who run the Charter. As a stunned Keya watches, Parker orders his team to use the Heart to drop an elevator carrying the King of Diamonds and her family, killing them all and wounding innocent bystanders in the process. Then, he locks down Nomad and Stone’s handler, Jack of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer), in an airtight bunker and shuts down the oxygen supply while ordering a strike on the King of Clubs — the same man who made the call in Chechnya that set Parker on his evil path.
“A lot of my character is also figuring Jamie out,” Bhatt said. “Keya doesn’t trust anyone given her life experience and he’s using her, but she’s also using him. At the end of the day, in her heart she’s a good person. She’s still extremely young, and she wants to go out there and destroy the world and bring all these people down. But does she have the ability to go to the extent that he does? I don’t think so.”
Betrayed, Keya now warns Stone of Parker’s plans. She has officially switched sides and uses her skills to take the Heart offline before Parker can do any more serious damage. But she’s not quick enough to prevent an explosion detonated by Parker that knocks Stone unconscious. As Stone slowly comes to, she receives a distressing call: Nomad and Jack of Hearts only have an hour to live before their oxygen runs out. With Keya pinpointing Parker’s location, Stone sets her watch on a countdown and peels off on a motorcycle. A simple race against the clock, right? Not so fast. Stone soon realizes that she’s being followed, which leads to an epic chase through Iceland’s frozen mountain roads. After her pursuer bites the dust, she arrives just in time to confront Parker, who’s about to torture Keya into cooperating with him again. The two former allies square off. Brutally. But Stone ultimately gets the upper hand. In that split-second, Keya throws Parker’s gun over to her, and Stone shoots him. You can exhale now.
For Bhatt, working on those wildly kinetic fight scenes with her co-stars was one of the highlights of the shoot. “It’s so collaborative,” she said. “Before we would start filming anything, we would block the scene and discuss it, not once, but a couple of times. That’s what was amazing about working with Gal: She takes everybody’s opinions as importantly as she would take her own.”
OK, now let’s return to the action: Stone’s watch chimes. The hour is up. Luckily, Keya has already turned the ventilation back on, and Nomad and Jack of Hearts wake up alive.
Good question. You be the judge. After the pulse-pounding events recounted above, the film flashes forward to four weeks later: Stone meets with Keya, who’s been imprisoned for her part in Parker’s mission, and offers the hacker a job with the new and improved Charter. The covert organization will still use the Heart, but the tech will no longer dictate every mission. “The Heart is an amazing tool, but that’s all it is,” Stone says. “We always follow the odds, then we’ll never do anything in spite of the odds.”
Keya accepts, and Stone hands over the playing card that will determine her top secret code name: the Joker. “She’s the wild card,” Bhatt said.
The final scene in the movie shows Stone, Jack of Hearts, and Keya now embarking on a new mission together. Could this be the start of a beautiful new friendship? Bhatt, for one, said she’s open to anything. “An antagonist goes either way. They become an ally or they die. I was very happy to still be alive at the end of it.”
