''From Cold War thrillers to suave superspies, the espionage genre has long celebrated mastery, secrecy and underlying power. But what happens when filmmakers twist those tropes into something stranger, funnier, or more rebellious? Undercover & Offbeat presents four films that each reimagine the spy story from a radically different angle.

Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik (1968) ,as part of Euro Spy current, transforms espionage style into psychedelic pop-art spectacle, centring on a master thief who outsmarts the system rather than serving it. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) takes the genre back to its roots with the archetypal “wrong man” thriller, where an ordinary advertising executive becomes an accidental secret agent - he is not having a good time. Angela Robinson’s D.E.B.S. (2004) gives the spy-school fantasy a queer, female driven spin, replacing masculine bravado with camp and romance. And the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008) reduces secret intelligence to bureaucratic farce, exposing the absurdities of surveillance culture and incompetence.

Seen together, these films reveal espionage not as a fixed formula but as a playground for satire, exploration of varied aesthetics and existential comedy. They invite us to look at the spy not as a perfect operative, but as a thief, a lover, a bureaucratic pawn or a fugitive - and to enjoy the genre’s constant reinvention.''