‘Black Bag’ movie review: an old-school, grown-up thriller that doesn’t put a foot wrong

Posted On March 19, 2025March 19, 2025

Most spy thrillers are bad. They rely on car chases and scenery-chewing villains to distract from gaping plot holes and non-existent character development, and it almost never works. Steven Soderbergh‘s Black Box doesn’t have a single car chase or moustache-twirling baddie, and it puts the rest of the genre to shame. The director and screenwriter David Koepp imagined the film as an espionage version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s acerbic play about an explosively toxic marriage. It thankfully never reaches those levels of claustrophobic anguish, but it does succeed in crafting a story about characters we can actually care about.

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett star as George and Kathryn, a married couple who also happen to be secret agents. When George’s superior hands him a list of five suspects who might have leaked information about a top-secret software program called Severus, he is put in the awkward position of having to investigate his wife. The rest of the suspects are his close associates, including his righthand man Freddie (Tom Burke), who he recently passed over for a promotion, Freddie’s girlfriend, satellite imagery specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela), smooth-talking operative James (Regé-Jean Page), who won the promotion Freddie lost, and agency psychiatrist Zoe (Naomi Harris), who is in a relationship with James.

In the film’s most memorable scene, George invites all of them over for dinner, telling Kathryn that he plans to drug the chana masala in the hopes that the culprit will slip up and reveal him or herself. It is a tense and masterfully written scene that blends bone-dry humour with whodunnit drama, revealing everything we need to know about the characters and their complex web of alliances and insecurities. After the plot is laid out in the first scene, this dinner sequence gives the audience a reason to actually care about each of the characters rather than expecting us to go along with every twist and turn of the ensuing mystery before we feel any connection with the people it concerns.

Soderbergh has the most eclectic filmography of any director working today. He’s made indies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, movie-star-driven crowd-pleasers like the Ocean’s franchise and Magic Mike, and, more recently, a host of technically experimental projects like Unsane and Presence. It’s hard to know what to expect from him, and after the disappointment of Presence, which was only released two months ago, one might assume that Black Bag would be an equally ill-advised stab at novelty. Luckily, it’s the opposite – a tightly-crafted 94-minute thriller that is neither experimental nor cliché.

Fassbender is perfectly cast as a creepily fastidious lie detector specialist who is so buttoned up that he appears to be slowly suffocating beneath his black turtleneck and thickly-lensed glasses. Blanchett is flawless as an impossibly glamorous operative who may or may not be working for a foreign government. You can practically smell her perfume as she threatens Pearce Brosnan in an elevator or casually tosses a leather jacket over the back of a chair. Although they appear to have a close relationship, George and Kathryn often fall back on the phrase ‘black bag’, which is shorthand for any topic which is a matter of professional confidentiality and, therefore, off-limits.

The Severus leak is the driving force behind the plot, but the central question of the film is about relationships, as Clarissa highlights in an exasperated monologue. How, she asks, can anyone in this line of work maintain a loving, secure relationship? You can’t date outside the profession because your partner would never understand you. You can’t date inside the profession because the secrecy will tear you apart. It’s a conundrum that hangs over all the characters in one way or another and plants a seed of doubt in the audience as they question the authenticity of George and Kathryn’s picture-perfect marriage.

Although Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? might have been the jumping-off point for the story, we quickly learn that the couple at the centre of this movie is not locked in a codependent death spiral. George is a certified Wife Guy, and no matter how much double-crossing is going on at work, he and Kathryn know each other inside and out. It’s rare that you get an on-screen depiction of a marriage that is actually aspirational. There was that scene in Poltergeist when JoBeth Williams and Craig T Nelson hung out in bed together smoking pot and watching TV after they put the kids to sleep, but with Black Bag, we get another level of marital goals, and it’s one of the most unexpected charms in this gem of a film.

There will be people who hear that this movie isn’t centred on death-defying stunts and decide to wait for it to come out on streaming instead of seeing it in the theatre, but that would be a missed opportunity. Black Bag is all about intricacy – intricacy of plot, intricacy of characters, dialogue, relationships, and alliances, and along with it, the intricacy of design. It might not have many explosions, but it does have the kind of lush, cinematic visual details that deserve the big screen experience and remind us that you don’t need CGI to create a spectacle. This is an old-school, grown-up thriller that they just don’t make anymore. Luckily, Soderbergh did it anyway. 

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