Where Ian Fleming’s espionage is flip and glamorous, John Le Carré’s is dreary and cynical; George Smiley is the anti-James Bond. Still, director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) wrings unexpected elegance from the ugly ’70s using beautifully composed, observational shots and camera movements. In Alfredson’s hands, the MI6 offices – “the Circus” – become suffocating brown panopticons whose tea-sipping inhabitants scrutinise each other’s smallest gestures, squirming with fear that their secrets will come to light.

Control (John Hurt) suspects there’s a mole in the Circus when agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) is disastrously ambushed in Budapest. When rogue field agent Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) seems to confirm this news to his supervisor Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), retired spy George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is persuaded to unearth the mole. Who’s working for Soviet spymaster Karla – thuggish Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds)? Suave Bill Haydon (Colin Firth)? Conniving Percy Alleline (Toby Jones)? Or urbane Toby Esterhase (David Dencik)?

The plot’s intricate, but it unfurls lucidly, with plenty of tension and evocative micronarrative moments in which bewildered spies reveal the sacrifices and compromises they’ve made for their work. Perhaps the removal of Smiley’s final illusions makes him the perfect investigator.

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