The film is based on a series of immensely popular Swedish children’s books, about the boy Bert, who is just hitting puberty and having the usual problems with it. But that’s where the usual ends abruptly.

In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet mole within his former colleagues at the heart of MI6.

Set in 1982 in the suburb of Blackeberg, Stockholm, twelve-year-old Oskar is a lonely outsider, bullied at school by his classmates; at home, Oskar dreams of revenge against a trio of bullies. He befriends his twelve-year-old, next-door neighbor Eli, who only appears at night in the snow-covered playground outside their building.

Detective Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose pink scarf is found wrapped around an ominous looking snowman.