It took 290 minutes over seven parts for the BBC to adapt John le Carre's chilling novel of betrayal and intrigue for television in 1979. That this big-screen version occupies less than half the time is a credit to co-writers Bridget O'Connor (who died of cancer a week before shooting started) and Peter Straughan, whose screenplay is a masterpiece of concision and precision: not a word or a glance is wasted and there's none of the flabby expository dialogue that makes the TV series sound quite clunky now. Whole chains of events are disposed of in a sentence. Yet only as the loose ends are tidied in the last couple of minutes is there a sense that things are hurried and indistinct.
This approach is more than just practical: it adds to the creeping sense of tension because we're constantly off-balance, plied with just enough information to keep up. The film is far from hard to follow, but it punishes the least lapse in attention.
It's an unlikely thriller: there's no car chase or fistfight and the few shots that are fired are widely spaced. Most of the time, men talk in offices or dark city streets - the palette is all cool blues and drab browns and scarcely a ray of sunlight pierces the gloom. And it's absolutely riveting from start to finish.
More than 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell, a story based in Cold War paranoia might seem dated. But director Alfredson, the Swedish wunderkind behind the macabre vampire romance Let the Right One In, knows that it's more than a story of its time and place.
Morally complicated and positively dripping with disenchantment and existential angst, it's a timeless revenge tragedy, a story of secrets, lies and the struggle for power.
