Sexy romances aren’t often built upon “flagrant monogamy,” but that’s what Steven Soderbergh manages with Black Bag.
This accusation of obnoxious commitment gets thrown at George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) at the start of the film. George is a veteran British spy married to another operative at the same intelligence agency, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett). The two have a reputation not only for slippery espionage but also marital faithfulness—two things that wouldn’t necessarily seem to go together. And, indeed, the movie puts their union to the test when George is tasked with flushing out a mole and Kathryn is named as one of the suspects.
Written by David Koepp, who also penned Soderbergh’s Kimi and Presence, Black Bag displays the twists and intrigue you’d expect from a top-rate spy flick, along with some scintillating dialogue. But it’s the movie’s intellectual provocation and formal invention that marks it among Soderbergh’s best work. As someone who prefers his innovative genre exercises over his more self-consciously arty efforts, Black Bag struck me as a refreshingly glossy spin on his navel-gazing independent debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Both films explore questions of deception, confession, and fidelity—of the personal, professional, and emotional variety—yet Black Bag boasts a wider canvas, a lighter touch, and a filmmaker at the top of his form. (Soderbergh also serves as both cinematographer and editor.)
Consider an early dinner party at George and Kathryn’s home, to which George has invited the four other suspects: Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), and James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page). Dishing out an array of camera angles and subtle movements, along with surgically precise edits, Soderbergh immediately gives a sense of the personalities and allegiances at play. (It also helps that the performances are stellar across the board.) Meanwhile, the lighting—with throbbingly bright lamps casting a haze in the otherwise dark room—matches the thematic mood. They appear to illuminate, but in reality only blur. Altogether, it’s a master class in balancing tension with efficient character development to create a palpable mood.
The intrigue only increases from there. The more we learn about Freddie, Zoe, Clarissa, and James—their arrangements, predilections, and indiscretions—the more they become stand-ins for the various challenges George and Kathryn’s marriage faces. Clarissa demands of George at one point: “When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?” And she is referring, of course, to both their personal lives and their careers.
Do George and Kathryn lie to each other? That is one of the film’s delicious questions, delectably bandied about between the two leads. Fassbender plays George like a steel trap; he’s more robotic here (in a good way) than he was as an android in the Alien films. Blanchett balances that with an elusive softness; there’s a moment where Kathryn makes closing a conference room door feel like foreplay.
Together, Fassbender and Blanchett create a singular couple with a provocatively peculiar relationship—not unlike Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps in Paul Thomas Anderson’s spectrally romantic Phantom Thread. You may not envy the particulars of their arrangement, but it’s hard to argue with the results.
(3/14/2025)
