Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh (2025)
In Steven Soderbergh’s latest, British intelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is assigned to investigate the leak of a top-secret software program – code-name Severus – and nail the person(s) responsible. George suggests completing the job in two weeks but his superior, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), warns that ‘If Severus is deployed as intended, thousands of innocent people will die’. So one week, then. Only five of George’s colleagues had access to Severus, including his wife and fellow spook Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). The potential leakers are invited to dinner at the couple’s London home, where George cooks the food and presides over round-the-table mind games – all part of his strategy to discover who’s the traitor. The four guests are also in relationships with each other, though not married ones: agent Freddie (Tom Burke) and satellite imagery whiz Clarissa (Marisa Abela) are one item, psychologist Zoe (Naomie Harris) and senior agent James (Regé-Jean Page) another. Uxorious George hadn’t for a moment thought Kathryn might be the guilty party: he understood her inclusion on Meacham’s list was a mere technicality. Once their dinner guests have left, however, George makes a chance discovery that leads him to suspect his wife.
Black Bag‘s writer, David Koepp, has devised a plot that’s convoluted yet neat, and supplied a high-powered cast with plenty of sharp, show-off dialogue. George and Kathryn trust each other implicitly but in their line of work they’re obliged to keep things to themselves: ‘black bag’ is the response each gives whenever the other asks a question that can’t be answered without breaching confidentiality. During one of George’s interrogations of Clarissa, she rails against the black bag mindset that encourages secret agents to dissimulate in their personal lives even when they’re not professionally bound to do so. Clarissa angrily demands to know what kind of honesty there can be in a spy’s moral universe. It’s a rhetorical question but one that matters in the story, and it prompts another question. Black Bag is certainly clever, but how clever?
George starts to doubt his wife after he finds a cinema ticket in a waste bin at their home; next morning, he suggests ‘a movie this week’ and names the one on the ticket; Kathryn’s happy to go see it even though, she says, she’s not heard of the movie. It’s almost reassuring that, in Black Bag’s world of sophisticated obfuscation, characters are just as liable as in EastEnders to bin a guilty secret for another character easily to find. Couldn’t the filmmakers think of anything better or are they amusing themselves by using such a cliché? It’s no surprise when it transpires the binned ticket wasn’t carelessness on Kathryn’s part but a plant to deflect George into suspecting her. But since George is super-smart, why would he suspect Kathryn rather than suspect a plant? Whether or not Soderbergh and Koepp are having fun with this detail too, the name of the pretend movie – ‘Dark Windows’ – is surely an in-joke: it’s a perfect summary of Black Bag’s visuals. Most of the film takes place indoors, its palette dominated by inky blue-black and gunmetal grey; there’s usually a window in the background that looks out on a pale, colourless sky.
Although Soderbergh and his cast clearly enjoyed themselves, the film’s air of smugness and the lead performances get in the way of making that enjoyment infectious for the audience. Cate Blanchett, in a thin role that doesn’t begin to stretch her, so overdoes sexy inscrutability that she’s sometimes ridiculous – though is that too meant to be part of the fun? When, late on, Kathryn and secret service boss Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan) are together in a lift and she leans across him to press the lift button, the movement is so extravagant that you feel Blanchett must be fooling around. Yet she’s also careful throughout – even in the lift – to remind us that her every line reading, gesture or facial expression is proof of her acting skill. Michael Fassbender is a very different problem. He’s determined to deliver his dialogue with the minimum change of expression or tempo: Fassbender is much more of an android here than he was playing a robot in Prometheus (2012). The actor who was so exciting to watch in Hunger (2008), Jane Eyre (2011), Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) has vanished. Tom Burke and Marisa Abela are more entertaining to watch: their roles are skinny too but Burke’s wit and Abela’s vividness give proceedings a lift. Although Pierce Brosnan is rather out of his depth in this company, that makes him more likeable – at least Brosnan seems a bit more human than either of the leads.
Not that humanity is of interest to Soderbergh here. It’s surely no coincidence that Black Bag‘s two most absorbing sequences depend on the technology of secret intelligence work: when Clarissa, under George’s instructions, redirects a spy satellite to watch Kathryn meet with a Russian operative in Zurich; and when George subjects all four of Clarissa, Freddie, Zoe and James to a polygraph test. The latter is especially deftly edited – by Soderbergh, under one of his usual aliases, Mary Ann Bernard. (He’s also, again as usual, his own cinematographer, as Peter Andrews.) I’m probably missing a level of irony or two, but I reckon the scene that really exposes Black Bag as less clever than it thinks is the short sequence in the cinema where George and Kathryn watch ‘Dark Shadows’. The movie seems to be a chiller of sorts – but a fun chiller: Kathryn cries out in alarm then giggles and scoops popcorn into her mouth. Cate Blanchett and Steven Soderbergh mean to show us the often formidable Kathryn happily relaxing with her husband; what we actually see is Blanchett performing fear and pleasurable relief so emphatically that her character looks to be putting on an act. This might make sense if Kathryn turned out to be the betrayer George worries that she might be. Since she isn’t, why is she unconvincing as a person simply enjoying a movie?
19 March 2025