Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Review

Alfredson makes espionage look like clerical work performed by exhausted men in brown rooms, and the effect is far more unnerving than any chase would be. The adaptation compresses le Carre to a series of glances and files, trusting the audience to hold four suspects and a decade of grievance without a recap. Gary Oldman plays Smiley almost entirely through stillness, wiping his glasses, listening, and his one long monologue about meeting Karla in a Delhi cell is delivered to an empty chair.

Hoyte van Hoytema shoots 1970s London in nicotine yellows and municipal greens, and the Circus itself, with its soundproofed room and its trolley of files, becomes the most convincing character in the film. Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and Tom Hardy each get one scene that reframes what came before it. The plot is genuinely hard on a first pass and the film will not slow down for anybody. But the payoff is emotional rather than procedural, a betrayal that is romantic before it is political, and the closing montage is a small masterpiece of tone.