Red Joan review: Judi Dench gives a typically subtle and deft performance as the OAP Soviet spy

Is she a hero or traitor? The filmmakers can’t quite decide

Dir: Trevor Nunn; Starring: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Tereza Srbova, Tom Hughes. Cert 12A, 101 mins

Imagine that the little old lady pruning her roses in the next door garden is a KGB informer. That is the premise from which Red Joan starts. Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is an OAP living in quiet retirement in English suburbia. She has pictures of her grandchildren on the mantlepiece but no portraits of Lenin or Hammer and Sickle ornaments.

There is an obvious curiosity value in seeing Judi Dench, M in the James Bond movies, back on screen as a spy but Joan is nowhere near as formidable as the MI6 boss who used to give the orders to 007. She is a frail and nervous woman who can’t bear to be in the glare of the media.

One reason Red Joan is so frustrating to watch is that the filmmakers can’t make up their minds about Joan. Is she a heroine who broke the Official Secrets Act because of her desire for global peace? Is she a traitor? Is she a naive fool, too easily swayed by her own sentimentality? An equivocal and tentative film portrays her as a mixture of all of these traits.

Director Trevor Nunn has worked before with Dench, perhaps most notably on the celebrated Royal Shakespeare production of Macbeth. There is little of the ferocity of that production here. Instead, the film trundles back and forth in time from 2000, when Joan is arrested and is being interrogated, to the late 1930s, when she was a fresh-faced undergraduate at Cambridge University.

Joan (played as a young woman by Sophie Cookson), arms herself with a hockey stick when an intruder appears at the window of her ground floor student rooms one evening. This is Sonya (Tereza Srbova), a sophisticated and decadent English Literature student from a mysterious eastern European background. Sonya introduces Joan to her communist friends, among them the charismatic Leo (Tom Hughes), to whom she is immediately attracted. He likes her too – but just not as much as he likes Stalin.

Sophie Cookson plays the younger Joan as a shy but resilient figure with a surprising streak of ruthlessness (Nick Wall)

The 1930s was the period of Stalin’s show trials, mass starvation in Ukraine and extreme terror but none of the Oxbridge communists in Joan’s new circle of friends are willing to acknowledge any of this.

Joan is an infuriating figure whose behaviour is as hard to fathom at the end of the film as it is at the beginning. As an old woman, she tells her police interrogators that she has nothing to hide. As a young scientist, she sleepwalks into spying for the Soviet Union and doesn’t appear to have any crisis of conscience about her own behaviour whatsoever. She is as reticent and discreet in her private life as in her professional career. She has affairs and sometimes seems to be in love but is far too guarded to give in to anything approaching real passion. The result is a film which, although very handsomely made, has little dramatic intensity.

The filmmakers capture the extreme chauvinism of the era. Politicians and men in authority don’t take Joan seriously as a scientist. They think she is there to make the tea or that she will be more interested in new technology for tumble dryers than in building atom bombs. Their blinkered sexism allows her to steal secrets under their eyes without anyone noticing. Her own son, a successful lawyer, has no idea about her past. He thinks that she spent her career as a librarian. “It’s like I don’t know you,” he says in dismay as details of her spying spill out, expressing a bewilderment at her character that audiences may well share.

Dench gives a typically subtle and deft performance as the OAP spy. She is far less imperious than when playing Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I or M. Her role here is closer to the one in Philomena, as the diffident woman addressing dark events in her youth. Nervous and self-effacing, she deals with the contradictions in her past simply by ignoring them. Dench hints, though, that she is more worldly and wise than she is letting on.

Sophie Cookson plays the younger Joan as a shy but resilient figure with a surprising streak of ruthlessness. She may seem demure but she is ready to use blackmail and subterfuge to protect herself.

Like its heroine, Red Joan is a film without any clear identity. It isn’t an espionage thriller. Nor is it a love story. Nor is it a drama about a woman’s political awakening. Certain elements here feel very glib indeed. The idea that Joan (based on the real-life KGB mole Melita Norwood) somehow ensured peace in our time by feeding information about atom bomb research to the Soviet Union is absurd. “I am not a spy… I am not a traitor,” she protests to the media who assemble outside her front door. Her justifications for her behaviour ring very hollow and it is not at all clear that she believes in them herself.