This film is so unlike anything I've seen Hollywood churn out recently that I was genuinely staggered. You have to concentrate. Hard. For the entire film. Alfredson gives you no easy routes, and you find yourself crossing your eyes in frustration. Is this a flashback? Is this guy dead? What's happening here? And yet despite how much effort you have to put in, the atmospheric approach makes it seem worth it. A malevolent, dreary London; a secret service turned corrupt bureaucracy. There are no James Bonds here, no glamour. Just paranoia, creeping cynicism, overwhelming nostalgia. Oldman's turn as Smiley is note perfect. Betrayed personally and professionally, doggedly pursuing the truth.

Go in with your thinking hat on. It's worth it.

"it was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. the west has grown so very ugly, don’t you think?" bureaucratic barbarism, an empire on its deathbed, a movie about how state espionage is as tedious and soul-sucking as it is impotent and grisly. i hope y'all will give this the best of the decade consideration it deserves.

there are no more morals left to be eroded, no more heroes, just a bunch of weary sociopaths looking for any kind of aesthetic pleasure in a labyrinth of confusion and carnage

Ugh, they spend so much time on the spies. Maybe the book is different, but I feel like the screenwriters barely even cared about the other three jobs.

buncha old fucks in a room someone turn a god damn light on

Doesn't go quite as hard as I had thought it did -- it's a bit clinical and procedural for my liking, and over-plotted narratives seldom work for me, and there's not much the film actively offers up for me to care about instead of the plot. Still, so many great moments of performance from Oldman's haunted monologue to the final stare-down between Strong and Firth. There's a lot on its mind with regards to the desexualized machinations of bureaucracy, a sense of repressed masculinity in the face of a world moving away from the battlefield and into the realm of intelligence, and because of all that it's deliberately probably the most unglamorous spy movie ever. The vacuous existence of "Karla" at the center of the movie just adds so much understated depth and tension. I just wish it didn't always feel like its primary concern was to tell its twisty, yet ultimately kinda uninteresting, espionage story.

Alurnya maju mundur.
Usahakan gak meleng, kalo gak mau kelewat jalan ceritanya.

Saranku, jangan nonton ini cuma 1x.

Beautiful gowns... gorgeous gowns.

The first time I tried watching this I quit 20 minutes in. I probably should’ve just done that again.

I watched this movie again, still very much not for me. I think it's s probably anm very good and unusual movie, but i was bored to no end.

This movie could’ve gone on for 5 more hours and kept going deeper and deeper and I would’ve been all the happier for it. A mystery as good as this is damn hard to come by nowadays.

This movie is part of what I like to call Cold War chic. It's not particularly great, and tbh I almost fell asleep because I was high af, but the a e s t h e t i c earns it four stars