<i>The Old Guard 2</i> Director Defends the Film’s Polarizing Cliffhanger Ending

Spoilers below.

It has, in fact, not been an eternity since Andy, Nile, and friends—the immortals at the heart of the surprise pandemic-era action hit The Old Guard—last graced our screens. But you’d be forgiven for feeling that way. Almost exactly five years have passed since The Old Guard landed in the midst of a very weird, very difficult summer, and a lot of “weird and difficult” things have gone down in the ensuing half-decade. But for a film franchise ostensibly about the peaks and valleys of time, The Old Guard 2 feels strangely inert.

The sequel, directed by Victoria Mahoney (taking over from Gina Prince-Bythewood, who directed its predecessor) picks up where the first left off, bringing us back into the tight-knit circle of warriors led by Andromache, a.k.a. Andy (Charlize Theron), as first introduced in Greg Rucka’s graphic novel. Blessed—or cursed, depending on whom you’re asking—with healing powers that have sustained them through eons of bloodshed, the crew faces a new threat in the form of an old friend: Quynh (Vân Veronica Ngô), Andy’s fellow immortal, who has been trapped in a coffin at the bottom of the sea for centuries, drowning and resurrecting over and over again. When she’s finally rescued from the ocean’s depths, Quynh tracks down another fellow immortal, Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), whose betrayal in the first film earned him a temporary exile from the Old Guard cohort. Quynh wants his help finding Andy, which means she wants revenge.

But Quynh isn’t the only one interested in the Old Guard’s whereabouts. Andy and her ally Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) meet with Tuah (Henry Golding), a bookish loner and immortal who informs them that the first-ever immortal, Discord (Uma Thurman), has been brushing up on the group’s history. When Andy finally learns that Quynh is back on solid ground, she agrees to meet with her ex—but she brings Nile (Kiki Layne) along as something of an insurance policy. Sure enough, Discord is hanging around, and it’s from Discord that Nile learns something about herself: She is apparently the last immortal, and as such she has an unspeakable power.

We later learn that this power of Nile’s is the reason why Andy lost her immortality in the first film. As the last of their kind, Nile has the ability to strip her fellow Old Guard-ians of their longevity and healing powers. How? By wounding them, as Nile did Andy in The Old Guard. Discord wants to take advantage of this ability, supposedly using it to rid the world of their fellow immortals and end their meddling in human affairs.

But as Tuah eventually theorizes to Booker, Nile’s maiming also presents an opportunity: Any immortal wounded at her hands can also “transfer” their immortality to another before it’s lost entirely. Booker, eager to make amends, decides he wants to transfer his to none other than Andy.

Confused yet? Hang in there.

Andy’s crew assembles at a nuclear facility where Quynh and Discord have planted bombs, hoping to trigger a nuclear meltdown. (For obvious reasons, the others do not want this to happen.) A face-off ensues, and multiple members of The Old Guard are subdued and kidnapped, leaving Andy, Nile, and Booker to fend for themselves. When Andy is cornered, Booker takes the opportunity to (finally) transfer his immortality to her—the mechanics of this are, uh, murky at best—then sacrifices himself at the hands of Discord’s remaining army. Discord soon captures Nile, but not before Nile deals a crucial blow to Quynh, sapping the latter of her eternal life.

Finally, Andy and Discord enjoy their long-awaited confrontation. During the heated battle, Andy discovers that Discord’s healing powers don’t seem to be functioning properly—and realizes, in a major twist, that Discord has lost her own immortality. Alas, she doesn’t want to kill her fellow immortals on behalf of humans; she wants their longevity powers for herself. And she intends to force Nile to kill the other members of The Old Guard, then torture them until they relinquish their immortality.

When Discord at last defeats Andy, stabbing her through the chest, Andy vows to track down and rescue her friends. “And when you do, the playing field will be level,” Discord promises. Ominous!

Afterward, Andy steals away to Tuah’s library with the injured Quynh, who heals the old-fashioned way (slowly, as any mortal would). The two former friends (and implied lovers) reforge their bond and exchange some witty banter. Together, they swear: They’ll get the gang back together.

A number of fans and critics have expressed their frustration with the abrupt and unresolved ending. Vulture determined that “The Old Guard 2 doesn’t tease a sequel so much as sacrifice itself at the altar of one, killing what little suspense it might have built up by simply rolling credits, with the already half-baked story presumably to be resolved during some future installment.” The San Francisco Chronicle added that the film’s “story holds little interest and, to make matters worse, it doesn’t even end. Instead, it stops mid-story, promising a sequel that feels less like a promise than a threat.” As one Reddit user put it, “They couldn’t even be bothered writing an ending to this movie.” According to AP News, “Audiences in 2025 deserve better.”

But Mahoney has defended the choice of a cliffhanger in several post-release interviews. In one discussion with Entertainment Weekly, Mahoney explained that there were “multiple discussions and multiple choices” around the film’s sudden (and unexpectedly playful) ending. Eventually, she decided she didn’t want to leave viewers with something “dark and heavy at the end.” As she explained to EW, “Leaving people at that last moment was something that I was interested in because...for me as a viewer, I don’t mind having complicated emotions and complexity in a movie, but at the moment, I don’t know if I really want to just be ending things in the dark, and I have to walk around doing the laundry with this heaviness on my heart. I mean, who needs that? We already have it. So I was all for any expression that would allow people to smile and wonder and root and cheer and have a sense of curiosity.”

In a separate interview with ScreenRant, Mahoney added that the emotional honesty of the “characters in any given moment” is “all I’m chasing. That it happens to be a cliffhanger, that it involves some stuff that may make some people happy and some people pissed off, that’s not my circus. I’m just trying to do it honestly and earnestly. I stand behind it.”

Not necessarily, though the cliffhanger implies the franchise will continue if Netflix gives a third chapter the green light. Way back in 2020, Rucka—the comics writer who created the franchise, wrote the first film, and co-wrote the second—told Looper.com that there was a “complete three-part story that can be told. God willing, if it’s a success, Netflix comes back and says, ‘Hey, let’s do it again.’ There’s more to tell, and there are questions that we want to answer.”

For her part, Mahoney has “no idea” about the prospects for a third film. When asked for any news, she told EW, “I hope for it, and I hope that audiences get it, and I hope everyone that goes to play on that third one has a ball and kicks ass and I’ll be rooting for them. I won’t be there,” she added, confirming that she will not return as director, “but I will be rooting for them.”