5 Harrowing Truths From ‘Ozzy: No Escape From Now’ – The Prince of Darkness Takes His Final Bow In Paramount+’s Devastating Farewell

Ozzy Osbourne has always defied the odds. A prince of chaos who found a way to turn madness into money and addiction into art. The father who, after decades of endless parties, lived to see his children grow up. For over five decades, the dark prince of heavy metal has remained remarkably, impossibly indestructible. Yet here’s no way to outrun the body, no amount of black magic to keep at bay the natural cycle of life and death. No Escape From Now, which arrived to Paramount+ yesterday, is the final chapter of the story of Ozzy Osbourne. Directed by Tania Alexander, the two-hour documentary details the last several years of his life, with all of the pain, determination, and absurdity that he’s come to embody. The result isn’t so much a rock doc as it is a portrait of an artist on his deathbed, staring down his mortality with defiance, gallows humor, and a sneer that has made him an icon since day one.

1) The Fall That Broke The Iron Man

Everything changed one evening in February of 2019. A quiet, seemingly uneventful night in which Ozzy, then on the mend from pneumonia and a string of infections, was making his way to the bathroom in his Los Angeles home when he fell and injured his neck. Doctors assured him it was no big deal and sent him home. The next morning, he couldn’t move his arms. On his second trip to the hospital, he was finally diagnosed with a broken neck.

The surgery that followed would prove to be his undoing. An operation to fuse his spine in order to stabilize it went badly from which Ozzy never fully recovered. Doctors inserted metal plates and screws on either side of his vertebrae. He awoke in pain he would never again escape. He would never walk again without assistance. “It’s a constant pain,” he says at one point. “If you have any kind of movement, it starts to kick in. It’s constant, it’s annoying. It gets to you after a while.” The family would later learn that the surgery was far more aggressive than it should have been. They were told by a new surgeon that the hardware was inserted much too far and that it “did things that didn’t need doing.” The damage was irreversible. He had the hardware removed, but his mobility was replaced by an all-consuming nerve pain in his arms and fingers. “That doctor stripped him of his ability to move,” says his son Jack, his voice still filled with anger. “He took that away and he’s never gotten it back.”

2) The Battle Inside His Mind

The pain in his body gave rise to an uglier struggle, the deterioration of his mind. For a man who had spent his whole life onstage, being forced to stay in one place was a particular kind of hell. Sharon could see his mental state unravel. He sunk into a severe depression. The cameras watch him in periods of stillness, slumped over in silence, in front of a television. He tells them that he thought that he would never be able to play again and started taking antidepressants. Ozzy admits to the producers that he was thinking of killing himself. Instead, the same camera lingers in long moments of devastating silence. Unfortunately, the same genius that once found solace in excess now had no clue how to sit still. “It’s like he woke up and was a different man,” Sharon whispers in a scene.

The one thing that kept him relatively sane was his music. Working on the album sessions for 2022’s Patient Number 9, produced by Andrew Watt, gave Ozzy some semblance of normalcy back. “The making of that record saved me,” Ozzy tells the cameras. Those days and nights in the studio became an escape from his agony, an opportunity to connect with the only part of himself that the disease had not taken.

3) Haunted By The Ghosts Of Black Sabbath

No Escape From Now dwells on Ozzy’s eternal relationship and rupture with Black Sabbath, the band that gave him a name and, eventually, an exodus from it. Nearly 40 years on from his 1979 dismissal, the hurt had not abated. His daughter Kelly refers to it as the loss he never recovered from. “Those were his brothers,” she says. “It destroyed him.” In one clip, the camera pans to find Ozzy silently watching old interviews with his onetime replacement, Ronnie James Dio. Sharon then explains to the camera that her husband never really listened to Dio’s Sabbath albums or spoke to the man himself. As time went on, compassion eclipsed anger. “He felt sorry for him,” she says.

Tony Iommi, his oldest friend in the business, was the last member of Sabbath with whom he grew particularly close before his health deteriorated. “Tony was there every week,” Sharon says. Their reunion at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham is one of the sweetest moments in the documentary. Two old friends, once rendered intractable by drugs and egos, back together in the Birmingham sunshine. For a moment, it’s as if time has reversed. Even as he lay dying, Ozzy spoke of Sabbath like an old scar that refused to heal.

4) Fame, Fragility, And The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Heartbreak

October 2024 is when Ozzy got what was supposed to be the biggest honor of his solo career, getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It should have been the highlight of his life, but as he sat in a throne too weak to play himself, it was the low point of the film. His best friends, including Billy Idol, Maynard James Keenan, Chad Smith, Robert Trujillo, Zakk Wylde and many more, played in the supergroup performing his songs to honor him. He could barely watch as others played his music while he sat still and silent. “A big part of my heart was breaking,” he says in the film. “I should be up there.”

Backstage before he was inducted, Jack Black, who would be introducing him, was practicing “Mama, I’m Coming Home” next to Ozzy’s throne. He tried to sing with him and couldn’t, but his voice cracked through nonetheless. Musicians in the room swore they saw him kick his legs involuntarily, as if his body could remember what it used to do up there on the stage. Hours later, he told the director that he had googled bionic prosthetics. Anything that might help him walk on a stage again. “The real Iron Man,” he joked. “Can I have one of them?”

5) The Last Performance – And The End Of The Beginning

By April 2025, just two months before the Back to the Beginning farewell concert, Ozzy was immobilized. He’d cracked another vertebrae, and he was recovering from pneumonia and sepsis. “The problem now is getting to England,” he said. “It’s fucking soul destroying. But I have to be there.” The willpower that had made his career refused to expire. Cleared from doctors he boarded a plane to Birmingham. The show that followed on July 5, 2025, was like no other in rock history. The lineup included Black Sabbath, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, Pantera, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and more, all there to pay tribute to the man who had helped make them.

From the backstage, Sharon watched as her husband trembled with fear and pain. “He’s very afraid,” she says, “but emotion will carry him through.” BOY it did. When Ozzy stepped into the lights, the roar of the crowd appeared to revive him. The footage shows him gripping the microphone with both hands, his body shaking, his eyes ablaze. Just 17 days later, on July 22, 2025, Ozzy Osbourne died at age 76.

No Escape From Now doesn’t idolize Ozzy, but it does show the unvarnished, human reality of a man who gave his all to music and kept giving long after he had nothing left to give. Towards the end of the film, Ozzy is seen sitting next to Sharon reflecting on his life. “If it’s coming to an end,” he muses, “I really can’t complain. I’ve had a great life.” That’s what the film leaves you with – not the madness, not the mythology, but a sense of gratitude. The story of a man who lived louder than life itself, loved harder than most, and faced the end not with resignation, but with a fiery defiance.