‘The Secret Agent’ Review

One utterance in “The Secret Agent” should suffice to persuade anyone of the haunting relevance of Joseph Conrad’s novel, published in 1907 and set in 1886, to our time: “This country is absurd in its mania for individual liberty,” an agent of a foreign government furiously informs the British police. The agent is a diplomat from czarist Russia, which believes the British are lacking in the zeal necessary to end the threat of anarchists spreading terror throughout Europe—a special concern to the czarist rulers desperate to quash rebellion of any kind. To jar the British into action, the Russians conceive of a plot to force one of their local hires—a British shopkeeper named Verloc (Toby Jones), up to now working as their paid informer reporting on anarchist groups—to arrange a horrendous bomb attack that will be blamed on anarchists.

In this spellbinding, and ultimately heartbreaking, three-part thriller adapted by Tony Marchant, the anarchist plotters are a motley lot driven by assorted vague political philosophies, resentments, mental derangement. They hold regular meetings to debate, discuss bombs and plots. They are not looking for a restoration of any caliphate; they have no wish to sacrifice their lives to ensure a place in paradise. And yet one of the group is never without an article of clothing familiar to everyone today: a suicide jacket complete with detonator.

There’s little here of the subtlety of Conrad’s novel, but there’s no dearth of moral ambiguity in these characters, either; even the worst can be susceptible to guilt. The group meets in the back room of the Soho sex shop run by Verloc and his loving wife, Winnie (Vicky McClure), whose even deeper love is reserved for her mentally impaired younger brother, Stevie (Charlie Hamblett), who will play a principal role in the bomb plot.

Its aim—to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. So symbolic a target, the Russian planners believe, will shock all of England. Verloc is blackmailed into committing this act, under threat that everyone in the anarchist group he spies on, every anarchist in Europe, will be made aware of his betrayal and be coming for him. He lives in a state of constant terror, devising desperate strategies to get the deed done—a state of being Mr. Jones transmits with remarkable skill. We feel his terror viscerally, along with his malignant design to succeed at any cost and survive. In the Conrad novel. Verloc’s first name is Adolf. In the film, it is Anton. The filmmakers doubtless had their reasons for that change.