Do You Want To Skip 'The Snowman?' (You Should)

Director Tomas Alfredson is in the ennui business. His films are heavy and portentous, often blanketed in the permafrost of his native Sweden and always just as chilly indoors. His 2008 breakthrough, , reinvigorated the vampire myth by draining it of sensationalism and using it as an affecting metaphor for the eternal loneliness of adolescence. Alfredson's last feature, a dread (and beige)-soaked adaptation, couldn't sort out Le Carré's byzantine plotting, but got his institutional Cold War paranoia exactly right.