Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of John le Carre’s novel is yet another reason to mourn the passing of Philip Seymour Hoffman. In his final finished screen work, he gives a remarkable performance as Guther Bachmann, a German intelligence agent who tries to turn a case involving a terrorist suspect to long-term western advantage. “A Most Wanted Man” is a post-Cold War spin on the novelist’s incomparable George Smiley tales, and with its somber European tone it very nearly matches them, in large measure due to Hoffman’s wonderfully lived-in turn.

Of course, the material was good to begin with—when it appeared the novel was hailed as Le Carre’s best in years—and Andrew Bovell has hewn fairly close to the spirit of the book in his adaptation, despite the obligatory abbreviation. The story is set in Hamburg, the German port where the cell that spawned the 9/11 attacks flourished. Because of that, the German authorities keep an especially close watch on potential terrorist activity there, which explains Bachmann’s presence in the city. He’s an experienced career agent (despite, as we learn, a disgrace that attended the collapse of one of his operations in Beirut), and has been put in charge of a special operation, working outside normal (read: constitutional) channels, to detect and deal with suspected dangers. He’s obviously a man in the mold of Smiley—an intelligence agent who prefers cunning to brute force, thinking strategically rather than tactically in devising ways to turn situations to larger advantage rather simply taking the easiest course of action.

At the moment Bachmann and his small team—which includes his lieutenant Ima (Nina Hoss) and computer expert Maximilian (Daniel Bruhl)—are especially interested in the activities of Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a distinguished Muslim lecturer and fund-raiser who may be funneling donations to terrorists through a Cypriot shipping company. But they also pick up on the arrival of an unkempt refugee, Ivan (or Issa) Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a young man of mixed Russian-Chechen background whose past include stints in both Russian and Turkish prisons. Looking haggard and desperate, he finds refuge with a kindly Muslim woman named Leyla Oktay (Derya Alabora) and her son, a boxer named Melik (Tamer Yigit). They, in turn, put him in touch with leftist lawyer Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), whom he enlists to help him to submit a claim with banker Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe) for a huge cache of cash deposited in a secret account by his dead, despised father. As Bachmann unravels what’s happening, he devises a plan to bring Karpov and Abdullah together to force the latter to become a western asset; and though Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bock), the crudely businesslike Hamburg intelligence chief for whom he has no regard, would prefer simply to arrest Karpov, Bachmann is given the opportunity to proceed with his scheme, thanks to the intervention of smoothly supportive CIA agent Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright). He thereupon brings Richter and Brue, both of whom are becoming increasingly protective of the brutalized Karpov, into his delicate operation as virtual co-conspirators.

If all that sounds complicated, rest assured things become more so—we learn that Abdullah’s own son Jamal (Mehdi Dehbi), for example, is engaged in a dangerous double game—and it’s a wise move on Corbijn’s part to play out the intricacies of le Carre’s tome, as refashioned by Bovell, with a degree of precision and point that some might find overly detailed and deliberate, but is in fact essential to keeping the narrative intelligible. It’s the same tactic he earlier applied to “The American,” the opaque George Clooney spy picture, but in this case it’s appropriate rather than mere affectation. And he’s aided immensely in this approach by Hoffman, who takes his time personifying a rumpled, dedicated man who’s suffered so long at the hands of liars and incompetents that he plays things so close to the vest, trusting no one but his hand-picked staff, that he can’t help but appear arrogant and abrasive to colleagues outside his immediate circle.

As it turns out, of course, Bachmann’s doubts about others supposedly on his side turn out to be well justified—“A Most Wanted Man,” after all, is an example of later le Carre, in which the author’s Cold War realism has morphed into deep cynicism and the world into an instant-result place where the elegant, far-sighted gamesmanship of Smiley and his Bachmann no longer has a role—and the denouement is a deliberately downbeat commentary on the ways of spycraft in the post-9/11 era.

The rest of Corbijn’s cast and crew make significant contributions to the film’s success as well. McAdams, Dafoe and Wright stand out among the supporting cast, but one shouldn’t overlook the stellar work done by Dobrygin, Hoss, Ershadi Dehbi and Bruhl, as well as incisive brief turns by others. Benoit Delhomme’s cinematography takes advantage of the Hamburg locations to evoke a suitably bleak ambience, though the habit of resorting to shaky, hand-held technique for action moments (like a chase scene) is intrusive; and Herbert Groenemeyer’s score adds subtly to the tone of near-despair.

But ultimately for all the excellent work on display in “A Most Wanted Man,” it’s Hoffman whom most people will remember. His turn as Bachmann can’t really be called a capstone to a career so studded with memorable turns as his was, but it does showcase his artistry to fine advantage: in his hands Gunter emerges as a brilliantly realized character—a tired, overweight, bruised but essentially humane person whose sharpness and patience are out of place in a world that has come to favor the blunt and the immediate. And though Hoffman’s splendid, subtle performance might not be the apex of his wide-ranging career, this intelligent, engrossing film proves a fitting finale to it.