70s spy yarn Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has been described as an “anti-Bond film”. It drudges up from retirement the most dismal and unheroic cast-off of the British intelligence service, George Smiley. As John le Carré’s ironically-named antihero, Gary Oldman blinks impassively throughout from behind dense lenses like a deep sea diver and wastes no time trying to garner audience sympathy.

Yet director Tomas Alfredson’s palate of browns and beiges and his exquisite attention to detail are a world away from any action film. Indeed, watching Colin Firth sip insouciantly from an espresso cup in his period three-piece brings Tom Ford’s A Single Man to mind more than 007. Single men more like.

Who knew spies were such repressed schoolboys? Those of Tinker use the same dorky breathless intonation interchangeably when talking about women, homosexuals and “the Americans”. A compelling scene has a female secretary type up an obscenity-ridden phone call between two male agents featuring the line “I don’t mind if you fuck me just as long as you call me ‘Sir’ in the morning.”

Their sexless starched world of espionage is riddled with bathetic code names that belie the boredom of it all. “The Circus”, “Witchcraft” and “Reptile Fund” to name a few. This jargon and Alfredson’s uncompromising realism come at the expense of exposition to the point that the film is often frustratingly unfollowable. Mingling fading European capitals and stifling windowless rooms in the industrial intelligence HQ, the plot jumps erratically between a grey past and a greyer present.

Still, the dry scratch of butter spread thinly on stale toast, the buzz of trapped flies behind glass and Benedict Cumberbatch tucking into a Wimpy’s make for grimly gorgeous cinema. August among the all-star cast is a magnificently silk dressing-gowned John Hurt. “A man should know when to leave the party,” he insists before the opening credits. All the parties of   are in the past and no one’s expecting anymore invites. You can see why