Anton Corbijn’s dour adaptation of John le Carré’s typically chilly post-9/11 thriller finds Chechen immigrant Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) at large in Hamburg, where he becomes a pawn in a power struggle between bankers, lawyers, and counter-terrorists. Philip Seymour Hoffman (in one of his final performances) is Günther Bachmann, a bedraggled German intelligence operative who wants to use the suspected jihadist as bait; Robin Wright is the trigger-happy CIA agent who agrees to bide her time; Rachel McAdams is the human rights lawyer caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Meanwhile Willem Dafoe puts his reptilian features to fine use as banker Thomas Brue, in whose hands the financial fate of the troubled and tortured Issa lies.

Shedding the clean lines of The American, Corbijn’s third feature echoes the murkier smoke-stained tones of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, albeit with a photographer’s eye for striking, angular architectural detail. While the supporting performances are strong (with special plaudits due to Nina Hoss as the only person who proves a match for Bachmann), this is very much Hoffman’s movie, his traipse through a moral no-man’s land providing the film’s signature beat – downbeat, distrusting, dishevelled. While some of the English-language dialogue proves a distracting contrivance (surely Germans would speak German to each other – unless they know we’re watching?), the air of paranoid mistrust rings true, evoked most eloquently by Hoffman’s world-weary face, which speaks a universal language.