‘Tinker’ with the formula

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See the word “spy” and one immediately thinks of James Bond, of snipers and fistfights, car chases and femme fatales. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy challenges this archetype as a throwback mystery that takes the superficial thrills of subterfuge and misinformation and boils them down to an intellectual, clockwork investigation. Who’s the mole and how do we smoke him out of hiding?

With a title that references the classic English counting game, Tinker is a countdown of its own sort, a measured whodunit with manners, a grand game of “tag, you’re it.”

Gary Oldman stars as an aging spy for British Intelligence with one foot out the door when he’s pulled into the hunt for a double agent feeding secrets to the Soviets in the early 1970s.

The catch is that the mole is, reportedly, from the very “top of the circus.” Oldman’s target must be one of a handful of colleagues he has known and befriended for decades.

Filled with an all-star cast of English talent, from Ciaran Hinds, Colin Firth and Tom Hardy to John Hurt and the underrated Mark Strong, Tinker could easily have devolved into a patchwork of—potentially fascinating—character studies. Instead, director Tomas Alfredson, who burst onto the scene with a similarly toned and patiently paced Let The Right One In, instead keeps his gaze on agency procedures themselves. They are the characters, and for that, he creates a unique cinematic journey, weaving in and out of timelines and plot threads to culminate at the truth.

With a steady speed and a dozen overly wordy scenes—this could be the most talky spy film of all time—Tinker may challenge some attention spans, but that doesn’t mean it fails to grip the audience. But this slow boil does at last bubble over with tension, and a time jumping edit job that skips forward and doubles back like a mark might do to evade an assassin. Thick with 1970s atmosphere, costuming and sets, rich details of the practice of being a spy lifted directly from John le Carre’s classic novel, and a subtle, but strong iceberg-like performance from Oldman make this a unique film worth setting one’s sights on.