This article contains spoilers for Argylle. If you’re here to find out if there’s a post-credits scene, there is! Ok, spoilers now. For real. Big ones. All of them.
The “Ending Explained” article format comes in a lot of different forms. Not to pull the curtain back too far or anything, but they’ve become a product of our digital landscape because no matter the medium or genre, folks are googling to find the ending. Nobody’s ever really happy about it, honestly. Commenters inevitably call the writer a shill and accuse them of being creatively bereft. Meanwhile, the writer stares dead-eyed at their cursor while they try to regurgitate what they just witnessed in a way that doesn’t make us feel like soulless drones.
But people keep googling it. So we have to keep writing about it. Because of that, our goal at IGN is to find a fun angle, or at least make it informative in a way that extends beyond the boilerplate synopsis that makes us want to slam our laptops shut and go find a whiskey.
This ending explained? It’s trying to protect you. I care about you, and I want to keep you safe and happy, so I am telling you that I sat through over two hours of Argylle so you don’t have to.
Argylle Ending Explained
The premise of Argylle is actually pretty great. It’s kind of like Stranger Than Fiction but with spies, at least in the beginning. Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a writer of the critically acclaimed Argylle book series. As she reads her stories, we see them played out by Henry Cavill (as Argylle) and John Cena as his right-hand man, Wyatt.
When Elly finds herself with writer's block, she puts herself on a train so she can go see her mother and hash out the ending to the fifth book in the series. Unfortunately, she is derailed — heh — by a bunch of for realsies spies who want her dead. Lucky for Elly, Aidan (Sam Rockwell), another spy but this time a good one, is there to protect her.
It’s in this moment that Elly learns that her books are actually reality, and she’s kind of acting as a fortune teller. The bad spies (they work for a place called the Directorate, but it’s not important) and the good spies need her secrets! Who will get to her first? For a moment, it seems like the good guys won out and it will be Aidan and Elly against the world as they race to find the silver bullet — it’s a dossier on the bad spies contained in a flash drive that looks like, you guessed it, a silver bullet — and stop their enemies once and for all!
But, plot twist! It turns out Aidan is a creep too! When Elly overhears Aidan telling an unseen man that he wants to put a bullet in her head, Elly takes Alphie (that’s her cat) and runs for it! She gets ahold of her mom and dad and tells them how to meet her in code, the clever girl.
Their arrival is met by the second plot twist: daddy dearest (Bryan Cranston) is actually the director of the bad spies, but Elly and her mother (Catherine O’Hara) have no idea. It doesn’t take long for them to learn the truth, though. Aidan’s caught up with them, you see, and he wants Elly to trust him. Kinda weird that he insists that she does so shortly before shooting her mother in the chest, but it’s ok because O’Hara’s character was also an operative.
Ultimately, Elly ends up trusting Aidan again after he insists that she took his words too literally. (I, too, would take someone saying they wanted to shoot me in the head pretty literally.) But, in the rush to escape, they must leave behind Alphie. Which is fine, because they leave to go find another Alphie, this one played by Samuel L. Jackson, the unseen man Aidan was speaking to when he said he wanted to shoot Elly. Human Alphie has one hell of a bombshell to drop on the writer.
Who Is Agent Argylle?
Bum bum buuuummmmmmmm, plot twist three is that the anxiety-ridden Elly has actually been Argylle all along (her name is actually, like, Rachel R. Gayle or something? It doesn’t matter). With the help of Alphie and a few well-placed swings from Aidan, Elly discovers that the bad spies got to her after a tragic accident and hypnotized her into forgetting that she’s a super spy. It’s a good thing they were able to jog Elly’s memory, because they know where the silver bullet is. The coveted USB is sitting with the “Secret Keeper,” and the Secret Keeper will only give the goods to the person she was told to. You guessed it: that person is Elly! Problem is, she has some muscle memory back, but no actual memory memories back.
Once they get to the Secret Keeper’s palace, Aidan drops a bombshell on Elly in one final attempt to jog her memory: they were lovers. Which would be kinda cute if Aidan hadn’t spent the entire movie calling Elly “kid,” but what do I know.
There’s a cute dance, they get yelled at for PDA by a palace guard, Elly gets called up to the Secret Keeper’s office where they share a pointless back and forth that ends in Elly putting on a hilarious tough girl voice and swearing a little before ultimately winning her prize. The silver bullet is finally hers! They can take down the Directorate! They won!
Sorry, I cued up the ominous music too early. The fourth plot twist is that Elly isn’t just Argylle, but Argylle is with the bad spies!
Wondering how and why this story is still going? Yeah, I was too.
Let’s fast forward here, because this is getting longwinded. Elly wakes up in the bad spies’ head office; she says she knows who she is now and shoots Aidan in the heart; she takes the cypher and uses it to help her fake mom and dad — oh yeah, O’Hara’s character is still alive by the way — decode the silver bullet; evil spy joy ensues until, you guessed it, yet another “twist.”
Before her accident, Elly was playing both sides before things went sideways. She really did love Aidan, the shot to the heart was a through and through wound so he’s fine (?!), and all of her time decoding the silver bullet was so she could actually send the contents to human Alphie.
But the computer didn’t send the file to Alphie. Why? Because there’s a passcode, and because apparently we will never be freed from the purgatory that is the film Argylle.
They have to go through two other locations before finally sending the damn file to Alphie. On the road there, there is an ugly-colored-smoke fight scene that Birds of Prey did better; there’s an ice skating on oil (yes, like crude oil. They’re on an oil rig for some reason) battle scene that would be funny if I wasn’t already annoyed as hell; Elly becomes the Winter Soldier for a second ala a music box and some code words that result in her trying to kill Aidan; and their bestie who you thought died in the beginning of the movie comes back and saves the day, a fact that is only noteworthy because it’s the incomparable Ariana DeBose.
Congrats. You made it to the end. Unless…
Argylle Post Credits Scene Explained
Full transparency, I leapt out of my seat in an attempt to escape the theater when the credits started to roll. But then I remembered that I have a job or whatever and trudged back to stand against the wall to see what other hell Argylle had in store. The answer? Another connected universe. Kind of.
Cut to the King’s Man pub, which is obviously a connection to director Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman spy franchise. The bartender asks the young man what he’ll have and he gives the code word (it’s actually a long-ass phrase, because of course it is), at which point the bartender tells him they must be really desperate if they sent the boy to him and hands him a gun. “What’s your name?” the bartender asks.
His name is Argylle.
Why? Because the post credits scene of Argylle — a movie about a writer who is also a spy and very much Bryce Dallas Howard’s Elly — is a trailer for the book where Argylle is evidently a part of the Kingsman universe. But it’s also a prequel so the Argylle you’re seeing here is not Henry Cavill. Also you can apparently buy this as an actual novel?
I don’t know, y’all. I hate this a lot.
Goodbye.
Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She's also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia
