Black Bag | Review
Michael Fassbender in Black Bag
Lover Husband Soldier Spy: Soderbergh Mines Matrimonial Espionage
By Nicholas Bell | Published on March 15, 2025
Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp keep the ball rolling on their low-fi genre hybrid larks with Black Bag, a loquacious espionage thriller, featuring a sparkly ensemble cast in a narrative which appears to mash together Edward Albee and John Le Carré. Love and espionage appear to make for strange bedfellows in this highly contained, formidably specific world where it seems clandestine propinquity limits the dating pool for colleagues who aren’t allowed to be honest about their day job with civilian outsiders, and the result is something of a satirical relationship comedy with perilous stakes. While the consequences of the various double crosses and intersecting agendas between a handful of characters tend to fly fast and loose, and perhaps intentionally never quite heralds any tangible tension, its rueful tone and irreverent approach navigates an elegantly adult demimonde managing to feel more top shelf than it really is.
George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is a senior British intelligence officer who is given a list of names by his superior, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgard). The list contains names of potential parties from their agency responsible for leaking a dangerous software program called Severus. On the list is George’s wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). As a way to determine the double agent, George throws a dinner party for the names on the list, including Clarissa (Marisa Abela), a satellite imagery specialist, her boyfriend Freddie (Tom Burke), resident agency therapist Zoe (Naomie Harris), and her boyfriend James (Regé-Jean Page). George has drugged the chana masala with truth serum and offers up a strange game about resolutions, which ends drastically when Clarissa stabs Freddie’s hand with a dinner knife upon accusing him of infidelity. Upon discovering a movie ticket stub for a film called Dark Windows in the waste paper basket, George becomes suspicious of Kathryn as the culprit, since she lies about having heard of the film. Tapping Clarissa to hack a satellite to spy on Kathryn during her secret trip to Zurich, he discovers she’s meeting with a Russian spy. Meanwhile, Meacham dies after suffering from a suspicious heart attack. James also approaches George to confirm Kathryn may have used an alias in which seven million euros were recently wired to Zurich. Kathryn, on the other hand, casts doubt on the allegiance of their supervisor, Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan). As doubt escalates, George and Kathryn throw another dinner party, this one with more deadly consequences than the last.
Following Kimi (2022) and Presence (2024), the collaborative efforts of Soderbergh and Koepp might be a mixed bag, but their approach hearkens back to a cinematic era defined by middle budget adult entertainment driven by storytelling and characterization. Black Bag, which refers to the term these couples use to refer to confidential information they aren’t allowed to share even with their most intimate relations, sometimes feels too slick for its own good, like the 007 treatment of Prizzi's Honor (1985). The narrative breathlessly tries to keep up with the ambiguous compromised software named Severus, which will trigger some kind of nefarious nuclear device. Who’s manipulating who and why also ends up feeling a bit overly complex as the film’s breakneck pacing flies through a week's worth of interactions between its handful of characters whose allegiance to one another is constantly in flux. What’s for certain, however, is the apparently undeniable commitment between George and Kathryn, who we’re told are “flagrantly monogamous,” and therefore, an anomaly in this romantically incestuous milieu.
The film’s two key sequences involve dinner parties, if they could be termed as such, at George and Kathryn’s home, which feel directly influenced by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), with the film receiving a direct reference in the third act by Tom Burke recalling the iconic tagline about being cordially invited to George and Martha’s for an evening of fun and games. Only these games turn out to be much more violent and deadly, with a stabbing and then a bullet wound defining the end of each evening. While Fassbender might be the lynchpin, it’s Blanchett who (despite a distractingly hard wig line) seems to be having the most fun as the aloof but vicious Kathryn. In her wake, Koepp actively fashions the supporting women as the more dynamic, flavorful personas. Naomie Harris, the cold resident psychiatrist who clearly doesn’t have access to the kind of personal secrets she desires, would appear to be the group's moral compass, except for when it comes to her own sexual desires. Marisa Abela, the junior member of the group (and fresh off playing Amy Winehouse) teeters on caricature as the sexually liberated Clarissa. Tom Burke and Regé-Jean Page tend to be duped by the machinations of their femme counterparts, but we’ve little sympathy for them, seeing as they’re ultimately self-serving cads whose only allegiance is satisfying their own desires.
What’s perhaps most interesting about Black Bag is how it defies expectations in presenting a world where we’d assume nothing is what it seems. However, it’s eventually confirmed this isn’t really the case, which makes the whole endeavor seem like a red herring Möbius strip, reaffirming the ideals and commitment of Kathryn and George, who live up to their shared promise to kill for one another, if necessary. Strangely, George and Kathryn would appear to have a more fulfilling and healthy relationship than poor George and Martha. But pity the fools who are invited to participate in any power couple's fun and games.
★★★1/2☆☆