Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play George and Kathryn, a married couple who work together in the Secret Intelligence Service: there’s a very New Spy moment when George, for inscrutable reasons of his own, smuggles his own ID card into his wife’s bag over breakfast and then has to wear a temp card on a lanyard.
Also: their overall boss, played by Pierce Brosnan, is nettled at the sight of George outside the office where he’s having an important meeting and with a remote, switches the glass pane to opaque frosting.
George is tasked with discovering who has leaked to the Russians an important security device which is so old-fashioned and McGuffiny it has to be transported around in the analogue real world.
So he and Kathryn host a dinner party for the suspects, who are to be covertly fed a truth drug in the chana masala which results in a bizarre outpouring of suspicious craziness from one and all: Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Zoe (Naomie Harris), James (Regé-Jean Page) and the dishevelled Freddie (Tom Burke) – this last being the spy drama’s traditional blokily down-to-earth “other ranks” figure familiar from Roy Bland in Tinker Tailor or indeed Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses, a show whose novelty resided in part in making this persona the lead. But what if Kathryn, to whom George is so uxuriously devoted, is the rat?