This is not above board. No one else knows.

George Smiley is quiet for the longest time, and when he does speak, it is with steady conviction. It’s amazing how glasses and an overcoat can transform a man. Gary Oldman, who shone so brightly as Stansfield and Sirius Black, disappears entirely into the body of a retired civil servant. He sits precisely, with eyes that move deliberately around the table. There they are: Tinker, Tailor, and Soldier. You’re wondering where the Spy is. So is everyone else.

Six men at the heart of the British secret service. This is their war room, from whence authors like John Le Carre envisioned ignoble men fighting back the red menace. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is Le Carre at the height of his paranoia. Shadowy figures move with impunity in a world of codenames and double agents, owed to Governments observing the maxim of security through obscurity. The screenplay is littered with references to The Circus and the Reptile Fund, offered without further explanation. This is not a film that waits for its audience.

In 1973, a British agent is dispatched to Hungary to meet with a defecting general. They sit at an outdoor cafe. Prideaux, the Brit, stirs his coffee and observes first the string band playing across the street, and then their waiter, who is sweating profusely. A shutter on a first floor window bangs gently in the breeze. We have long associated such stillness with trouble, and Prideaux feels it too. He turns to leave, only to be shot in the back. As the crowd scatters, his lifeless body slumps onto the cobbled street amidst passing screams and the revelation of a mole.

Two men had long suspected such a high-level intrusion. They had grown uneasy at the influence wielded by a small cabal of top officials, whose reputations were built on covert Soviet Intel obtained under the ‘Witchcraft’ program. They eagerly shared their bounty with their Americans counterparts, who, in turn, imparted their own. When Smiley – forcibly retired from the service some time ago – is contacted by an old figurehead to investigate his former associates, the stories he finds ring familiar. One woman was blacklisted after having brought allegations against the Soviet cultural attach to London. Another, a former agent working out of Istanbul, tried to alert his handlers to a double agent, only to be labelled a murderer, fugitive and Communist sympathiser.

You see how the film moves, but the pieces are ever in flux. There is nostalgia for a time passed; that of the great war, when the lines were more clearly drawn. Now, no one seemed to know what, or who, they were fighting. Claustrophobia was inescapable when even friends and neighbours were suspects for the enemy within. The set design amplifies that suffocation: authentic and referential, paying homage to a dusty era staffed not by attractive faces when average ones would do. The key players – Oldman, John Hurt, Toby Jones – are rightly aged. They move with the weight and anger of their years, cast for that and not some ill-defined point of marketability.

There is a tricky plot to follow – trickier still when its various strands are finally united – but there is no shame in asking an audience to concentrate, or even to watch again. Indeed, it is to be applauded. A weighty novel and its subsequent 7-part TV series have been drawn down into a concise, 2-hour work. Events are not always clear; explanations curtailed by the necessary push for time. So many complex films are needlessly so, and we respond with boredom. Here, our attention does not falter. What awaits is a stirring conclusion to the beat of La Mer, which some may better remember as Bobby Darin’s Beyond The Sea. Such a strange epilogue to the world that has gone before. That a dry 70s conspiracy should resolve in a french pop song and a return home; triumphant, as it ought to be.