‘Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent’

Christopher Hampton’s 1996 film is such a dense, faithful and absorbing adaptation of the great writer’s 1907 novel about an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory that you must be prepared to pay exceedingly close attention to it or risk losing your way. A study in character and fate rather than an exercise in suspense, it has a cast as unusual as the film itself, headed by Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette, Gerard Depardieu, Robin Williams (billed coyly as George Spelvin) and Christian Bale. It has the same authentic sense of period as Hampton’s “Carrington.” We’re plunged into a narrow Soho side street on a dark night in 1886. Inside a notably discreet and spacious porn shop, its burly proprietor, Verloc (Hoskins), is conducting a meeting of anarchists as his mother-in-law (Elizabeth Spriggs) is preparing to move from the family living quarters upstairs; a stagecoach awaits her outside (HBO early Saturday at 5:25 a.m.).