When it comes to chameleonic director Steven Soderbergh, you may feel like you’re seeing double this year — at least if you noticed the January theatrical release of the indie pioneer’s first haunted house movie, Presence (now on VOD). March brings us Soderbergh’s somewhat more heralded Black Bag, a spy drama set in London and starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married intelligence agents who have secrets — even from each other. Both movies were scripted by David Koepp, a Hollywood fixture with credits ranging from Jurassic Park and other blockbusters to Panic Room.
The deal
George Woodhouse (Fassbender) doesn’t like liars. Part of an old intelligence family and a wizard with the polygraph, he’s legendary for his prowess in sniffing out agents who are up to no good — including his own adulterous father.
When fellow agent Philip Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) learns that a cyber weapon called Severus has been leaked, potentially endangering thousands of lives, he gives George a week to track down the culprit within the agency. The suspects include a cocky young tech whiz (Marisa Abela); her sardonic older boyfriend (Tom Burke), who was recently passed over for promotion; his younger rival (Regé-Jean Page); and the latter’s girlfriend (Naomie Harris), who is also the agency shrink.
Like any good detective, George invites them all to a fancy dinner party, then doses their food to make sure the conversation gets lively and confessional. His loving wife, Kathryn (Blanchett), who’s also part of the agency, watches the results with amusement. What she doesn’t know is that she is George’s fifth suspect.
Will you like it?
Black Bag is a film that will have some viewers riveted by every stylish second, while others use the dark theater as an opportunity for a nap. To decide which you are, answer this question: Are you mainly hoping to see Fassbender and Blanchett do their take on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. & Mrs. Smith?
If so, look elsewhere, because Black Bag is a self-consciously “adult” film of a type rarely seen on the big screen these days. There are no action heroics — indeed, virtually no action. Information is the currency these spies are after, and some of the tensest scenes involve characters staring at satellite feeds or polygraph readouts.
Black Bag is the rare genre movie that assumes its audience’s intelligence and interest in keeping up with a devilishly twisty plot. I don’t normally mind the lack of captions, but exposition flies by so fast here that they would have been helpful.
Instead of the set pieces that James Bond and his ilk have trained us to expect, Koepp’s script unfolds through a series of freighted conversations among fearsomely smart and secretive people, each of whom has something to hide. As Abela’s character points out, spy spouses and lovers can dodge any question about their activities with the phrase “black bag,” meaning that answering could compromise an operation.
You might be reminded of a cozy mystery, except that there’s nothing remotely cozy about this setting or these characters. Acting as cinematographer and editor, Soderbergh opens the movie with an impressive tracking shot that follows George into a basement club where he finds Meacham misbehaving, then out again. One of the more kinetic scenes, this is also the most we see of life outside the hermetic spy enclave.
Soderbergh lends visual interest to his dialogue-heavy scenes — dinner parties, agency meetings, therapy sessions — by backgrounding the characters in pearly, sinister luminescence. Kathryn swans around in draped, reflective fabrics (Ellen Mirojnick did the costumes) that make her very presence seem like a trick of the light. Now we see her, now we don’t — much like George, as he grapples with the possibility that he doesn’t know his wife at all.
Blanchett gives a performance soaked in femme fatale glam, while Fassbender makes George her steely, watchful counterpoint. Along with Pierce Brosnan’s delicious turn as the agency head, these are larger-than-life portrayals that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood classic.
Yet, fun as these people are to watch, there’s not a whole lot of substance underneath, and that criticism could be applied to Black Bag as a whole. Aside from Burke and Abela, whose volatile characters have an intriguingly messy relationship, the actors often appear to be playing types more than human beings.
Soderbergh and Koepp don’t seem interested in which of these spies actually care about protecting the public and which of them are truly as gleefully amoral as their dinner-table banter suggests. The distinction is weightless, merely a clue to resolve the issue of whodunit.
Black Bag succeeds as old-school entertainment, a reminder that smart people deserve escapism, too. Just don’t expect that fabled bag to yield anything deeper.
MARGOT HARRISON
If you like this, try…
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011; rentable): Set during the Cold War, Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the John le Carré novel about MI6’s search for a Soviet mole takes a similarly wonky, slow-burn approach to spycraft, with memorable performances from Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Tom Hardy.
Haywire (2011; PLEX, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Roku Channel, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Soderbergh also tried his hand at the action espionage subgenre with this thriller featuring Gina Carano as a special ops agent, Fassbender again and some unusually realistic fight scenes.
“Slow Horses” (four seasons, 2022 to present; Apple TV+): Dysfunctional spies who flunk out of MI5 end up in the subagency Slough House in this Emmy-winning series based on Mick Herron’s novels.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Black Bag 3”
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
