Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wynne, an engineer and a family man, recruited by MI6 in 1960 to connect with a member of Russian military intelligence named Oleg Penkovsky - here played by the superb Georgian actor Merab Ninidze - who, alarmed by escalating tensions between the U.S.S.R. and the West, had offered secret information about his country’s nuclear capabilities.
The movie is honest about the decidedly unglamorous side of spying: chiefly, that it is a line of work in which human beings are often treated as easily discarded pawns. There are echoes here of Spielberg’s ‘Bridge of Spies’ and Cumberbatch delivers a compelling performance in a film that brilliantly encapsulates its time and place.