The business of who knows what is very important within a film. It applies to what the viewer knows as well as what characters understand. Get the balance right, and you can create all kinds of effects on the audience. Viewers knowing that a protagonist is dying, and her kids being ignorant of that fact, has one effect when she bids them farewell. The children finding out at a later stage in a letter from her creates a different response.

Generally speaking, managing information in this manner is what creates much of the emotional impact of a story. It’s also critical to how plots operate. Thrillers in particular depend on the intricacies of audience knowledge versus character knowledge: knowing that the hero’s gun has just the one bullet left when he commences the showdown with the bad guy puts us even more in his corner as he has to delay his shot for the right moment, or improvise an alternative weapon.

So, the control of epistemology (ie how you know what you know) is vital to the success of a screenplay. And playing fast and loose with that rule of thumb is central to the effect that Burn After Reading has on an audience. The semiotics of the film tell us that this is a spy thriller, what with the zoom from space to the CIA HQ, the titles appearing with electronic noises onscreen, the bombastic soundtrack.

But the scene that we’re privy to isn’t one we’re conditioned by these cues to expect. No insider secrets about Chinese cyphers or rogue assassins here. Instead, a tightly wound John Malkovich getting downgraded in his work as the result of his drink problem, which he responds to by saying that compared to his Mormon counterpart, everyone has a drink problem.

And so it continues. Malkovich tries to share his shattering news with his uptight wife, but she’s more concerned that he hasn’t got the cheeses for their party that night. In fact, given the prevalence of espionage in this film, the biggest secrets we learn are about peoples’ sex lives. The spying game seems ludicrous, grown men running about taking very little information far too seriously. Finding herself in possession of a computer disk containing Malkovich’s memoirs, Frances McDormand’s character does what you’re supposed to do in a spy film and tries to sell them to the Russians. No dice: they’re not interested.

All that spying does in the film is increase everyone’s level of paranoia, a fascinating and valid comment on espionage as a genre and way of life. George Clooney’s character is convinced he’s being pursued by the CIA and that eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All the running round is done on the basis of sexual shenanigans and worthless intelligence memoirs, though the characters are fully engrossed in fantasies about the meaning of what they’re doing.

It’s a fascinating stance for a film to take, and a brave one: Burn After Reading is, as the senior intelligence people at the CIA HQ acknowledge, about nothing in particular. The characters invest meaning in what they’re doing, but really they’re just getting worked up about nothing. And that’s as sharp a take as you’re likely to see about espionage as any, one that came through stronger on my second viewing of the film after seeing a trailer for Ridley Scott’s forthcoming spy thriller, Body Of Lies. I’ll watch it, and probably enjoy it, but after Burn After Reading it’ll be hard to take Hollywood espionage stories seriously.