Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

Lies like us

Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag-- his second feature released in the first three months of 2025-- is arguably his best in years: a stylish, sexy thriller that of all things celebrates the bond of marriage, a relationship espionage writer John Le Carre might have once characterized as a significant weakness in an intelligence officer.

Soderbergh taking on a script by David Koepp (who has collaborated with the director on at least two other films (Kimi (2022), and Presence (earlier this year)) has cooked up his version of that most classic of spy games: a molehunt, the search for a possible traitor who has stolen Severus, a powerful computer software capable of crashing nuclear reactors (loosely based on Stuxnet, an actual malware unleashed by the United States on the Iranian nuclear weapons program). National Cyber Security Center officer George (Michael Fassbender) is charged with unmasking said renegade and invites dissipated managing agent Freddie (Tom Burke); his satellite imagery specialist girlfriend Clarissa (Marisa Abela); agency therapist Dr. Zoe (Naomie Harris); and her boyfriend and managing agent James (Rege-Jean Page) to a small dinner prepared and served by himself, hosted by his lovely wife and colleague Kathryn (Cate Blanchett)-- who, George is told, is also a suspect. 

Call this Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with a dash of Thunderball glamour; hosts and guests are all beautiful and witty, their conversation lightly delivered yet cunningly barbed, their motivations frankly feral. George has spiked the main dish with a tongue-loosening drug ("avoid the chana masala," he warns Kathryn) and as a result talk, and at one point blood-- in the form of a steak knife nailing someone's hand to the dining room table-- flows freely. A fun night, in short, is had by all.

But as Agatha Christie and even Le Carre-- no slouch at fashioning intricate mysteries himself-- might assert, it isn't the who or how that's so interesting as it is the why. Soderbergh and Koepp dream up perversely fascinating characters afflicted with imaginatively dysfunctional relationships, from Clarissa with her father fixation on the older incurably unfaithful Freddie ("When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?" "This is why you can't date a SIGINT, they're all fucking insane") to elegantly professional Dr. Zoe ("I've got nothing to hide!" "Then we'll start with you") to supremely confident Kathryn ("He told me that I want too much and that I cannot have it all. I'm gonna have his job-- you watch.") to quiet and arguably most perverse of them all George ("Little Georgie surveilled his own father" "I don't like liars"). Meaty characters for talented actors to sink their thespian teeth into and if they drool a little from the savory succulence, who can blame them?

Perhaps the most fascinating dynamic flows between George and Kathryn. "How can you tell the truth about anything?" Clarissa laments; George and Kathryn keep as mum as possible about details of each other's duties and somehow make it work-- even more unlikely make it sexy. Kathryn's clearly the dom in the relationship; when they're with others Kathryn (Blanchett channeling her Elizabeth persona) rules like a queen; when they're alone she clambers on top, hungry to devour him. George knows his place; Fassbender, who's not lacking in natural charisma, seems to contract into some kind of black hole, eventually yanking the hole in after himself. He's singleminded in his pursuit of the possible traitor, a focus rivaled only by his loyalty to his wife, and the contradiction (that the traitor could be his wife) is tearing him apart. Kathryn for all her confidence knows what she has in George, and trusts that singlemindedness ("Have you seen him when his jaws lock on something? You'll rip yourself apart before he'll let go. Eat up! This ends with someone in the boot of a car."), will go to surprising lengths to protect that mind. It's a surprisingly graceful pas de deux, with Blanchett playing Fred Astaire to Fassbender's demure Ginger Rogers-- Blanchett leading and Fassbender mirroring her steps backwards. 

Is it a great spy thriller? Well now hold on a second. It's smart and sexy; it has Soderbergh wielding his own camera in a series of cleverly staged and framed shots, assembled (by Soderbergh himself) with fluid precision and a lively pace, lighting each scene just enough that we can distinguish the faces in the surrounding ethical murk (except for the rare sunlit scenes on a boat in a fishpond, and a bravura passage involving furtively hacked spy satellites observing a Zurich park bench). It boasts of a royal flush of some of the most beautiful actors one can drool over in recent cinema. It's stylish, but in an intelligent and understated-- as opposed to vulgarly extravagant-- way. 

And while Fassbender and Blanchett go a long way to selling us the idea that yes these beyond-gorgeous people do possess the same feelings we do-- anger and ambition and jealousy and love-- they aren't as palpably real as the sadly cuckolded long-retired George Smiley (so memorably played by Alec Guinness and later, at a different register, by Gary Oldman), or the memorably exhausted Alec Leamas (Richard Burton in arguably his most magnificent performance). They fascinate us much as Ian Fleming entranced us with tall tales of secret agents drinking and killing and womanizing their way around Europe and the Caribbean, but don't hold up a mirror to our faces, forcing us to see ourselves. Fun, but a somewhat disposable fun, with just maybe a tiny secret kernel of honesty smuggled in under all that entertainment.

First published in Businessworld 4.4.25