Heart of Stone sees Rachel Stone, a spy who works for a secret agency, trying to prevent the agency’s most powerful and dangerous AI technology from falling into the wrong hands. The film is now streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Rachel Stone is an MI6 agent. She is a hacker who assists her team, which includes Parker, Yang, and Bailey, on missions. As Stone is not a field agent, she works behind the scenes, while Parker and Yang work in the field.
However, what her team does not know is that Stone is undercover. She is a superspy who works for a global peacemaking agency called the Charter, which comprises ex-intelligence operatives who answer only to themselves and have no national allegiances or political leanings.
On a mission to catch Europe’s most wanted arms dealer, Mulvaney, she singlehandedly saves Parker from Mulvaney’s men without her team finding out about it. The team still fails to arrest Mulvaney, as he swallows cyanide.
When Stone’s team was catching Mulvaney, a woman hacked into their comms feed and showed her face to Stone for a few seconds. This woman broke through the highest levels of military encryption, including that of MI6. Now MI6 and the Charter are both after her.
The Charter is made up of four teams. Stone is known by her codename, Nine of Hearts. She is part of the Hearts team, which is led by Nomad, also known as the King of Hearts.
Furthermore, the Charter spies are guided by an AI technology called The Heart, a quantum computer sophisticated enough to hack into and find anything, anywhere. It can predict the future, as it analyses all the possibilities and tells the spies exactly what to do to get the best outcome.
The Charter finds out that the hacker is Keya Dhawan, an orphan from Pune, India, whom Niam Kharche, a billionaire investor, considered a prodigy and took under his wing. He trained her, but she left him when they had a falling out.
The Heart predicts that Keya is going to Lisbon, and the Charter feeds this information to MI6. Stone has a feeling that something is not right, but Nomad does not listen to her. Stone and her MI6 team are sent to Lisbon to catch Keya.
There, the team is attacked. The team clears the way for Stone to escape, but she ignores the Heart’s instructions and decides to stay back to save her team. With Stone’s help, they all make it out alive, but Stone’s cover is blown.
The moment Parker finds out that Stone is a Charter spy, he kills Yang and Bailey. He also injures Stone with a poisoned knife. It turns out that Parker has been looking for the Charter for six years. He is now working with Keya, and the two of them lured Mulvaney out.
Mulvaney did not kill himself; it was Parker who gave him cyanide. Before he was killed, he told Parker about the Heart. Keya and Parker knew that the Charter had infiltrated the MI6, and they did all this to flush out the Charter spy.
The poison starts working, and Stone is paralyzed. Parker injects something into her body and leaves. A barely conscious Stone is taken to the Hearts team’s HQ. Soon, the Charter’s system is compromised by a Trojan delivered wirelessly.
Stone wakes up, takes out the chip that was injected into her arm by Parker, and destroys it. Although the system was compromised for only a few minutes, Parker and Keya now know about the locker in which the Heart is kept and its location.
The locker is 85,000 feet up in the air and cannot be reached without a space shuttle. Stone suggests that they shut down the Heart, but no one listens to her once again. In fact, Nomad tells her to stand down, as Stone blew her cover and they do not know if she can be trusted.
Keya contacts Stone after the Charter lets her go. Keya finds out that Parker killed Yang and Bailey, which was not a part of their plan. Stone then warns Keya that she is coming for her and Parker.
All four kings of the Charter meet to discuss the issue. Nomad is told that in 2015, in Chechnya, a Chechen warlord was given free rein by the Chechen and Russian governments. Parker was there with the MI6, delivering weapons to take the warlord out.
The MI6 found out that Parker’s entire team had been executed and that there was no one left to save. To prevent the weapons from falling into the warlord’s hands, the charter ordered a drone strike on that place. The charter assumed all the personnel involved died.
However, Parker did not die, and now he wants to take the Charter down. With Keya’s help, he is going to steal the Heart. Meanwhile, Stone tracks Keya’s location and figures out that they are going to West Africa to steal the Heart from the locker.
Keya had placed a code in the Charter’s system when their system was compromised. The code gets activated now, and the locker drops from its height. Keya and Parker go inside to steal the Heart, but they are not alone, as Stone also arrives there.
Stone fails to stop Keya and Parker from stealing the Heart, but she does manage to stop Keya from getting away with Parker. He has the Heart, but he needs Keya to access it, as she encrypted the Heart to her biometrics.
Stone knows that if she kills Keya right here, then Parker would no longer pose a threat and this will all be over, but she decides not to kill Keya, as she does not let herself be ruled by logic but follows her instincts and emotions.
When the two women are stranded in the desert, Keya tells Stone that Niam Kharche used her parents like lab rats in a medical trial. Her parents died, and Kharche covered it all up. That is why he took Keya under his wing. Keya wants to make him pay for what he did to her parents.
Her plan is to expose Kharche’s crimes. Parker is going to do the same with the Charter. Keya wants to use the Heart for people who have been wronged like she was; she has a list of people she is going to expose.
Keya knows about Stone’s past as well. Stone was a rebel when she was young. She was kicked out of many schools until Nomad took her in. Nomad trained her and showed her what she can do when someone has her back.
Keya and Stone finally find a way back to civilization when a woman offers them a lift. Stone lets Keya know that the Charter can expose Kharche and that Parker’s way is not the only one to achieve her goal. Stone also attaches a tracker to Keya’s clothes without her finding out about it.
When they reach a town, Stone is attacked by several armed men. She asks Keya to go with her, but Keya does not join her. Stone gets away once again, and she is found by Nine of Hearts. Stone finally gets in touch with Nomad, who had sent spies to look for Stone. Nomad now wants Stone to stop Keya and Parker.
On the other hand, Keya finally sees how Parker’s men kill people who stand in their way without showing them any mercy. This perturbs her, as she never wanted to kill anyone.
Heart of Stone ending explained in detail:
Do Parker and Keya manage to use the Heart?
With the help of the tracker that Stone had placed on Keya, the Charter starts looking for Parker and Keya. For their safety, Nomad moves to a secure bunker with the Kings team, and they conduct their search from there.
Stone finds out that Parker and Keya are in Iceland, and the Hearts figure out that they are going to the computer lab of a university. Before the Charter could reach them, Parker and Keya get the Heart online and start using it to get what they want.
Why does Keya betray Parker?
While Keya uses the Heart to find evidence against Kharche, Parker uses it to find the Charter. He kills the King of Diamonds, and along with her, other innocent people are killed. Keya realizes that Parker intends to murder the Charter spies, not expose Kharche and the Charter.
Keya tries to stop Parker, but he ignores her pleas and continues murdering people. He finds the bunker where Nomad is hiding with the Hearts. He locks them in the bunker and cuts off their oxygen supply. The Hearts will be dead in an hour.
The Clubs team, followed by Stone, heads to the university to catch Parker and Keya. What they do not know is that Keya and Parker are not at the university; Keya had found the tracker, and Parker had used it to set a trap for the Charter.
Parker plans to kill the Clubs when they get to the university. Keya realizes that Parker has been corrupted by power. She does not want to be a part of the killings, as her parents would have never wanted this, and decides to help Stone stop Parker.
Do Keya and Stone succeed in stopping Parker?
Keya uploads a failsafe to disable the Heart. She then hides and contacts Stone. Keya tells Stone about Parker’s trap and convinces her that she is telling the truth. Stone chooses to trust her and does not enter the university.
Stone tries to warn the Clubs team as well, but she is a little late. Parker causes explosions that kill all the Clubs, along with many innocent people. Stone survives only because she trusted Keya.
Stone finds out that she needs to gain access to the Heart within fifty minutes to save the Hearts team. For now, the Heart has been disabled by Keya. It does not take Parker long to find Keya. He threatens to torture her if she does not get the Heart back online.
Stone manages to lose Parker’s man, who was chasing her, and reaches the place where the Heart is. Stone and Keya team up to take Parker down, and the two women succeed in killing Parker. Stone then uses the Heart to save the lives of all the Hearts just in time.
What happens to Keya?
Four weeks later, Stone leaves a doll house that Bailey wanted to gift his niece outside her house. She also visits Keya in prison. Stone has gone back to working for the Charter, but she agreed to do so on two conditions.
Firstly, Stone, who always follows her own instincts, believes that the Heart only gives them the odds, and if they follow the Heart’s instructions blindly, they will never be able to do anything in spite of the odds. Whenever the odds tell them to do nothing, the Charter will send Stone.
Additionally, Stone wants to change the world for good, and she misses her team, so her second condition is to have Keya join her team. Stone gives Keya a card with a joker on it.
Sometime later, Keya is seen working with Stone and her other teammate, Jack. While Stone works in the field, Keya does the work that Stone used to do when she worked with her MI6 team.