If the dreary, rainy gray of 1977 Berlin seen in the new remake of Suspiria is not to your liking, perhaps you might prefer the slightly brighter hues of The Little Drummer Girl’s 1979 Pan-European palette. It’s all in service of a story that’s only slightly less grim than Suspiria’s—yet the director of the AMC spy miniseries (premiering November 19), Korean master Park Chan-wook, rescues it from abject darkness. There’s some sun, and some pretty views, even if they are marred by violence from time to time.

AMC successfully did spies and sun with the 2016 miniseries The Night Manager. So, the network decided to dip back into the well of novelist John le Carré’s oeuvre and came up with The Little Drummer Girl, a lauded 1983 novel about a Palestinian bomber, an English actress-turned-double agent, and her haunted Israeli handler. The Night Manager was a rather breezier affair than Drummer Girl, which trades in a morose, fraught ambivalence. Viewers expecting Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Debicki in fabulous clothes, squaring off against an obvious villain in a sun-splashed villa, may be a bit confounded.

The Little Drummer Girl is messier and more ideologically complicated, giving voice, if not equal weight, to two different sides of a conflict that either has many sides or exactly two, depending on whom you ask. The series is about a leftist, anti-Zionist actress, Charlie (Florence Pugh), going undercover for the Israelis to pose as a woman sympathetic to a Palestinian terrorist’s cause. As an ethically compromised heroine, Charlie’s motivations don’t always make sense—which may be the point. Divested of any real politics, she becomes obsessed with the reality of her performance, drawn back in after moments of doubt by a curiosity about where in the real world her fiction might take her.

In that way, le Carré might be saying something pretty cynical about political empathy—that any attempt to try to understand the “other side” is really a disingenuous, even self-serving act of false relativism. I think le Carré is more of a humanist than that, which leaves me confused about what The Little Drummer Girl is really about in a big, geopolitical sense.

On the more individual level, the series is (more clearly) about how we are formed by our own fictions, how every emotion could be seen as artifice, repeated and repeated and repeated until it’s truth. (The same could go for ideology, I suppose.) The Little Drummer Girl is something of a bleak romance in that way, between Charlie and her main handler, Gadi (Alexander Skarsgård), who fall in love as he trains her to pretend—really, to believe—that she was in love with a man she never knew. The early episodes detail that courtship and tutelage, a pleasingly familiar spy-in-the-making story tinged with sex and sadness.

Pugh is terrific throughout, once again asserting her star-on-the-rise status. She smartly mixes earthiness with sophistication, wisdom with naïveté. We believe it when Charlie adeptly maneuvers a tricky situation, and when she stumbles; her aptitude for tradecraft is not sleek or superhuman. If Charlie’s emotional torrents—how quickly people fall in love in this series!—are less credible, that’s not the fault of Pugh. I’m a little less willing to forgive the mopish Skarsgård, whose dour performance is more one-note, and does little to make us forget his obvious Nordic-ness. (They’ve dyed his hair brown, at least.) Michael Shannon, as the head of the operation, is a lot more interesting to watch, stern and vengeful behind a big mustache.

The other star player here, of course, is Park, who stages things with an arch-menace. He seems enamored of the hard lines and unexpected angles of Europe’s brutalist and modern architecture. Placing his actors in front of, or in, these strange buildings, he creates a tingle of the surreal. Where are these severe places, exactly, designed for a future that never arrived?

The trouble with Park’s approach, though, is that his blend of somberness and wit is not a terribly fitting foundation for the romantic and sexual heat the story requires to really take flight. I never quite bought anyone as lovers in The Little Drummer Girl, because the world it takes place in seems so allergic to anything so sincere. Maybe that alienation is deliberate, Park reminding us that nothing is real if everything is a lie, as it so often is in clandestine espionage. Still, I wanted to feel more of the series’s angst and desire, rather than merely appreciate its elegant articulation.

The Little Drummer Girl also suffers from a problem of expectations. The setup to Charlie’s adventure promises such grand intrigue that the actual mission could probably never live up to the hype. Some nail-biting stuff does happen once Charlie goes out into the field on her own, but the eventual climax, and conclusion, of The Little Drummer Girl’s plot feel oddly small—a blunt and violent end that closes the story off from its broader implications. But that’s the way of things, I suppose; the particular is never quite a match for the possible.

Despite that, the series is well worth a look, for its shaggy Euro style—how pleasingly ugly all the cars were back then!—and for Pugh, who once again does a knockout turn, sharp and soulful. The Little Drummer Girl may lead her into vague melodrama, but Pugh marches along at her own impressive beat.

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