Carlos director Oliver Assayas concocts an exciting and labyrinthine Miami-based thriller from a cold-war espionage story, co-starring Penélope Cruz

One morning in Cuba, René González kisses his wife and child goodbye, drives to the airstrip and steals a yellow biplane. He is fleeing poverty and communism and lighting out for the west – just another intrepid defector poised to fold himself in amid the swimming pools and art deco apartments of an abundant Miami. His future’s so bright he needs aviator shades.

Except, it’s more complicated than that. Yes, Olivier Assayas’s labyrinthine political thriller is here to shine a light on the exiles who targeted communist Cuba in the 1990s. But the film’s title is a clue to where its true loyalties lie. The so-called Wasp Network was a deep-cover cabal of state-funded spies, tasked with infiltrating anti-Castro groups in the US and relaying information back home. This was an army of shadows in Miami’s bright places, thwarting terrorist attacks on a country its members might not set foot in again.