There’s a lot to be said for spy thrillers built around the ability of actors to show off their skills by utilizing a poker face. By forcing a high level of opacity on the performers, it allows a film to rest in its mystery while everyone gives deadpan looks. Black Bag is a film that plays things so cool yet off-center that one could forget that co-star Pierce Brosnan once starred as the world’s most famous secret agent. The movie is just that comfortable, letting the audience in on information when necessary but otherwise entertaining everyone with its slick yet efficient style. Having the film sacrifice action-packed theatrics in favor of squabbles stemming from inter-office relationships makes the film all the more playful as well as adult. The results are another quick burst of solid entertainment from a director who makes it look easy.
Michael Fassbender stars as George Woodhouse, an elite British operative and human lie detector. He works for Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) with his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett). Right at the start, Woodhouse is tasked to uncover a mole in the agency, and is given a list of five suspects, including four colleagues and his wife. Will Woodhouse’s utterly strong devotion to one of the organization’s most trusted agents skew his mission? Perhaps the messy personal lives of the others will reveal the ultimate truth.
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Portraying these other suspects, we have Tom Burke as the past-his-prime Freddie Smalls, Naomie Harris as the firm and religious Dr. Zoe Vaughan, Regé-Jean Page as the strait-laced Col. James Stokes, and Marisa Abela as the outgoing and overly confident Clarissa Dubose. Brosnan is on board as Arthur Stigelitz, the head of NCSC, clearly wearing the elder statesman image well.
This film is directed by Steven Soderbergh, who last worked with Fassbender on another international espionage film, Haywire. In that 2011 film, he stacked an overly qualified cast around a once-promising Gina Carano to present a 70s-style riff where an emerging action star could pummel some A-listers and their henchman. For Black Bag, coming from a script by David Koepp (his third collaboration in three years with Soderbergh), we’re now trading in fisticuffs for the sake of exploring the personal lives of some spies.
A clear reference point for what transpires in this movie is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? but now with a dose of John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to go with it. Okay, perhaps decade-old film and literary references are not the sexiest of ways to present a modern spy thriller, but that’s why you have a cast like this one, let alone a filmmaker like Soderbergh, who can get to the point.
At 93 minutes, this movie wastes almost no time, which is entirely emblemized by the casting of Fassbender and Blanchett as a devoted married couple who are also the best at what they do. We only get a few minutes with them completely alone, and yet the film knows exactly how to frame them, depict their actions, and structure their dialogue for an audience to immediately understand this dynamic.
Similarly, while not handled as theater, there is a proper display of the other four suspects in quickly defining the aspects of these characters that stand out. It’s also fortunate that a film like this knows how to have fun with these character types. Even if Abela and Burke are the loudest of the group, it doesn’t stop everyone from getting in some witty lines, pointed reactions, and more.
This is only amplified by Fassbender’s attempts to get at everyone through a party game, one of the film’s many notable setpieces (another features a lot of crosscutting during an intense and amusing polygraph test). Watching Fassbender find his way into another detached character who can put all his emotions into a black hole to get at the truth is fascinating to see. Black Bag has no shortage of ways to show just how skillful he is at detecting deception.
As noted, this film relies on the cast’s willingness to lean into the lies they could be telling. Koepp’s script never cheats, as we are constantly aware of where we are in this story. Still, it does allow for various interpretations of what any of these characters could be thinking at any one time, which speaks to the layers slowly being peeled back as we go.
Does this story speak to more significant concerns about our society? I’d say no more than how Soderbergh/Koepp’s terrific KIMI leans into being a modern-day thriller very much set in a world altered by the COVID-19 lockdown. That doesn’t mean it’s all just topical seasoning. Still, so much of Black Bag feels informed by the choice to explore the mindset of characters who already live secretive lives and how that affects the relationships they are willing to participate in.
Regardless of greater intent, the results in this film are all quite strong. It’s an excellent showcase for many of the performers involved, though the suspects all shine. Most of them are made up of stars who are more recently breaking out, and it’s a good sign of what to look for as they expand their filmographies. Soderbergh, of course, finds unique angles and other ways to embrace what could be seen as fairly plain settings, making for a polished feature. And on top of all this, David Holmes returns to compose another lively score for Soderbergh, adding some extra life to it all. Spycraft may seem complicated, but in the hands of Soderbergh and his team, sometimes all it takes is a tense conversation around a table with a few well-dressed folks.
Black Bag opens in theaters on March 14, 2025.
