Halfway through this dexterously tense thriller the movie's unlikely hero, London university lecturer Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor), is asked why he's risking everything to assist a Russian mobster hoping to defect. Because, Perry eventually ventures, "it's the right thing to do".
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At that point you can rightly fear for Perry, because Our Kind of Traitor is an adaptation of John le Carre's 2010 novel, and things rarely occur, even if they're meant to, simply because they're right.
The screenplay picks up in Morocco, where Perry and his girlfriend, successful lawyer Gail Perkins (Naomie Harris), are taking a holiday that can't hide the fractures in their relationship. When Gail departs dinner early, Perry is coerced by a $25,000 bottle of wine and the cheerily blunt invitation of Dima (Stellan Skarsgard) to join his Slavic entourage at "a Russian party", the kind of bacchanal that's very wild until it get very ugly.
The crude and charismatic Dima, is a money launderer for a crime syndicate whose generational change will likely mean a death sentence for Dima and his family. He asks Perry to arrange his escape with MI5.
It's a tightly plotted story, placing Perry and the initially unimpressed Gail between the doubtful security services and the murderous Russians. It's only the obsession of their British handler, Hector (Damian Lewis), which gets an operation under way.
While Our Kind of Traitor is sometimes light on moral ambiguity, it succeeds by ratcheting up the unease. The film is seductive, you can get lost in the visuals, but that's a telling illusion.
