Black Bag

Steven Soderbergh hit the ground running in 1989 with his Palme d’Or-winning feature debut, sex, lies, and videotape, and has spent the ensuing decades building a broad, fascinating filmography that refuses straightforward placement along the populist-to-avant-garde spectrum. Even so, the past five years have been a particularly prolific period for Soderbergh, who has helmed 10 wildly distinctive features, shorts, and television series since Unsane (2018), in addition to pulling producing duties on several other projects. Not too shabby for a man who was once palpably exhausted with filmmaking and guiltily flirting with retirement.

Given recent, more formally daring works such as High Flying Bird (2019), Let Them All Talk (2020), and Presence (2024), it would be easy to classify Soderbergh’s latest feature, Black Bag, as one of those “for the suits” crowd-pleasers that pepper his filmography. A glossy, sexy, 93-minute trifle starring a couple of bona fide movie stars, this twisty, Le Carré-tinged espionage thriller doesn’t break any new ground, either narratively or technologically. Reuniting Soderbergh with Kimi (2022) and Presence scripter David Koepp – a veteran cineplex populist in his own right – Black Bag is the kind of fleet, mid-budget movie for grownups that prompts critics to declare that “they don’t make them like this anymore.” (They do, of course, if not as frequently.) If the excitement for Soderbergh’s latest feature is muted somewhat by its relative tameness, artistically speaking, the pleasures that it offers are still those of a master wheelman taking a $60 million sports car for a spin around the track. Sometimes, as a moviegoer, it’s just fun to watch a bunch of hot, dysfunctional people spar over power, sex, and geopolitics.

Unfolding over a single week in the philosophical hall-of-mirrors that is Great Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, aka MI6), the film centers primarily on veteran counterintelligence expert George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender, settling nattily into his porkpie-hat Dad Era). During a clandestine meetup at a London bar, an agitated undercover informant (Gustaf Skarsgård) drops a doozy of a revelation on George. The SIS has a mole in its garden, a turncoat with their fingers in a top-secret cybersecurity project code-named Severus. Then, a second bombshell: One of the five suspects with the means, motive, and opportunity to betray the Crown is George’s wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), a legendary MI6 officer.

George is justifiably unsettled by this disclosure, given that the only thing stronger than his loyalty to king and country is his devotion to Kathryn. Their joint reputation as SIS’s resident, rock-solid power couple is based on what seems to be a genuine, ride-or-die affection between husband and wife. Or so George thought. Kathryn’s possible treason has him scrutinizing her actions and second-guessing his own conflicted emotions. He hastily organizes a dinner party at their perfectly appointed townhouse, giving his wife a redacted version of the truth. Namely, that there is a possible traitor among their four younger guests: signals tech Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), longtime confrere Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), counterintelligence protégé Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), and in-house psychiatrist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris). George allows Kathryn to believe that she is in on the game, lending her ruthless instincts to the mole hunt, but she is also an unwitting suspect in her own home.

George is supposedly a master manipulator – SIS legend has it that he once polygraphed his own father – so perhaps it’s desperation that prompts him to spike one of the side dishes with a pharmacological tongue-loosener. Things go predictably off the rails at dinner, leading to wounded feelings all around (and a few other injuries). Unfortunately, George is no closer to discerning the identity of the traitor, and meanwhile Kathryn’s every glance and utterance seems layered with triple meanings. This kicks off an eventful week at Vauxhall Cross, as George goes a bit off-book in his zeal to prove (or is it disprove?) his wife’s seditious involvement in Severus. Complicating things further is the looming gray-wool shadow of SIS chief Arthur Steiglitz (James Bond himself, Pierce Brosnan), who seems to have an innate dislike of both George and Kathryn, notwithstanding their admitted skill at international skullduggery.

Most aficionados of spy thrillers will quickly suspect that George is being played, although exactly why and by whom are not immediately obvious. However, the pleasures of Black Bag are less about the twists themselves than the cool precision that Soderbergh exhibits in revealing them. Pulling triple duty as director, editor, and cinematographer – as he has typically preferred to do since roughly The Girlfriend Experience (2009) – the filmmaker keeps the proceedings humming along at an urgent but not breathless clip, matching the rat-a-tat tempo of Koepp’s jargon- and quip-dense screenplay and David Homles’ jazz-touched score.

Soderbergh seems both keenly attuned to the genre’s appeal and strangely agnostic about its usual trappings. Naturally, he’s an old hand at the frothy, high-tech procedural bits, such as a ticking-clock set piece involving the repurposing of a briefly off-duty spy satellite. However, it’s the human element that really seems to get his juices flowing, whether in tense one-on-one confrontations loaded with veiled threats (and not-so-veiled innuendo), the red psychological meat of Dr. Vaughan’s counseling sessions, or a banger sequence in which four polygraph tests are intercut into a single, steadily accelerating montage.

Black Bag executes a tricky tonal balancing act, aspiring to a chic breeziness while still conveying the life-of-death stakes of intelligence work. Soderbergh and Koepp draw some influence from the Bond knockoffs that proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly more serious-minded iterations like Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer. (Fassbender’s tweed-and-turtleneck game certainly pings that indelible ’60s Caine style.) Yet Black Bag also feels like a work that’s aiming to be the fun-loving cousin of slick-yet-gritty 21st-century British spy series like The Night Manager (2016) and Slow Horses (2022-). For the most part, Soderbergh and his collaborators successfully split this difference between frisky and severe, in part by maintaining a focus on the fucked-up dynamics of their relatively small cast of characters.

It might be reductive – and a little cliché at this point – for a work of fiction to insist that the vicissitudes of British espionage turn on a snarl of petty resentments, romantic entanglements, and childhood hang-ups among a handful of maladjusted agents. Indeed, Koepp’s screenplay can’t resist turning subtext into text for the cheap seats, as seen in several monologues that underline the paradox of maintaining stable interpersonal relationships in the netherworld of modern spycraft. Isolated from mere mortals without security clearance, SIS employees are obliged to exclusively date other professional liars, leading inevitably to infidelity, paranoia, and substance abuse.

Yet there’s an undeniable charm to the film’s soapy sordidness, one underlined by a supporting cast that is uniformly game to lean into their characters’ obvious foibles and their self-awareness about those flaws. (Though Abela is a particular delight as an unrepentantly horny girl-next-door with daddy issues.) Blanchett and Fassbender’s characters preside over these squabbling children like surrogate parents, projecting the kind of unflappable competence – and old-school movie-star magnetism – that burnishes Black Bag’s wobblier moments. It’s almost enough to make a viewer idly wish for a whole series about George and Kathryn’s cloak-and-dagger escapades. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail, leaving Black Bag on the table as a stylish one-and-done.