Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Adult thrillers can be hard to come by these days, and that’s a damn shame. By ‘adult’ of course I’m not referring to films like Basic Instinct but to something more akin to George Clooney’s The American. Say what you will about the pacing (I happened to love it), but The American made no attempt to pander to a younger, ADD-riddled demographic and instead told exactly the story it wanted to tell. Thankfully Clooney and director Anton Corbijn aren’t the only filmmakers interested in such an endeavor.

Tomas Alfredson made a big splash on the international scene with his vampire coming of age tale Let the Right One In, itself an adult thriller of sorts, and later this year he returns to the screen with an adaptation of the John le Carré bestseller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s a spy thriller set during the waning days of the Cold War and sees an agent pulled from retirement to help ferret out a mole in Britain’s MI6 organization. The cast list reads like a who’s who of British awesome including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, and Ciarán Hinds.

Looks fantastic doesn’t it? There are some incredibly good actors here going head to head, and an old-fashioned spy story has its own appeal as well. I’m as excited for MI3: Ghost Protocol as the next guy, but it’s refreshing to see a spy film more focused on the mind games and characters than it is on the stunts and gadgetry. It should also be interesting to see how Alfredson handles the transition into English-language cinema. It’s impossible to judge solely based on a trailer, but it appears he’s doing a better job than poor Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (the brilliant The Lives Of Others)