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All the Old Knives review – Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton add class to CIA spy drama
Pine and Newton play former lovers in this watchable Le Carré-esque tale of personal and patriotic betrayals
Maybe a little unexpectedly, Amazon Studios have given us a very watchable and classily upscale espionage drama-thriller in the spirit of John le Carré. Danish film-maker Janus Metz Pedersen directs and Olen Steinhauer adapts his own much-admired spy novella, centred on two former lovers in the cloak and dagger business who meet for dinner in a chi-chi Californian restaurant. The story is in fact inspired by a BBC TV drama that had nothing to do with spies: The Song of Lunch starring Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman.
Henry Pelham (Chris Pine) is a CIA officer haunted by a disastrous event eight years earlier, when he was at the Vienna station: a plane hijacking ended in a hundred deaths because the terrorists were somehow able to anticipate the authorities’ counter-attack. And he is still heartbroken because his CIA colleague Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton), with whom he was and is deeply in love, broke up with him just afterwards, abandoned the service and is now a placidly contented wife and mother in Carmel, California.
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