The most pivotal scene in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy rests on a phone call. It's not an espionage thriller where Matt Damon gets to kill someone with a pen. The assault is on someone's privacy, not person. As Gary Oldman's stifled Smiley alerts one character, “I need you to do something for me. You have to assume they're watching you." Today, this could be apt advice to anyone, not just an MI6 agent. Audiences don't need to be lured into the theatre with promises of Jason Statham beating someone into a pulp anymore to feel equally enthralled and threatened. The word wiretap will suffice enough to shock.

While wiretapping was a foreign and frightening concept to the public back in 1974, when John le Carré wrote the famous novel of the same name, today, it's as commonplace as murder on our front pages. Although director Tomas Alfredson couldn't have anticipated the downfall of The News of the World when the latest version of Tinker went into production, it can't be argued that there is a better time for its current release date.

Tinker relies on the assumption that we're always being watched or overheard. These covert pryings are literally ripped out of the official books just as crucial voicemails were deleted. Wiretapping is such a violation because it bursts the precious periphery of our privacy and then denies we ever had any.  The people who do this are those we trust to report the truth or protect our secrets, not steal and sell them. Even at its lowest common denominator, we are a paranoid society. Facebook privacy settings remain unsettling as we worry over how many inane wallposts Mark Zuckerberg has kept for posterity. Tinker may be set 40 years ago, and though we will never understand why Benedict Cumberbatch would wear a side-swept fringe, the film's watch-everyone-who-is-watching-you premise is more relevant than ever.

Tinker is not Hollywood's final foray into Cold War films this season. The upcoming release of The Debt (30 September) is another film full of regrets and vengeance. Like Tinker, it jumps between time periods to relegate lies that the protagonists are uncertain about revealing or not. It stars the latest ubiquitous ginger, Jessica Chastain, as a Mossad agent sent to 1966's East Berlin to capture the Nazi surgeon of Birkenau, with Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas as her colleagues.
All goes well (or so we think) and by 1997, Chastain has morphed in Helen Mirren (who all women want to be in their 60s) and her colleagues, Tom Wilkinson and Ciarán Hinds (also in Tinker) respectively. They may have aged well, but their guilt over what may or not have happened back in the Cold War hasn't.

The three are hailed as Israel's heroes, but has the meaning of that word changed in the past 31 years? The same question is in Tinker, as one former spy waxes fondness for WWII, claiming it was “a real war”at least. Given more recent military scandals than can be listed in this article, the definition of war and hero continues to shift and remain ambiguous. Thus, The Debt strikes a culturally relevant nerve as well.

Effectively, this makes Tinker and The Debt more of a reflection of our contemporary society than period pieces. However, these films really aren't about politics. What makes Tinker so unique is that it's about personal, not patriotic betrayal. Similarly, The Debt wouldn't have been made if the story revolved around three successful spies, but because these spies are remorseful, the plot abounds. These films reflect our headlines, but ultimately connect with us because relationships are everyone's weakness.