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The stunning new spy thriller Black Bag is, among other things, a sparkling ode to a happy marriage. I mean, in part, the union between the film’s leads, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Catherine St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), high-profile British intelligence agents who, it turns out, are a longtime spouse. But I’m also talking about the flourishing creative partnership between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp, two prolific Hollywood veterans, both in their early sixties, who have found in each other a nimble, hard-working kindred spirit. Both understand the mechanics of the genre inside out; they also recognize that those mechanics, with the right oiling and a burst of inspiration, can still produce rich and satisfying fruits.
Over the past three years, they’ve made three thrillers together, each brimming with wit, style, and understated formal ingenuity. Their first, Kimi (2022), was a succinct, un-Hitchcockian exercise in the story of an IT analyst with Covid-exacerbated agoraphobia; it felt like The Parallax View or a pandemic-era Rear Window with browser windows. Then came Presence (2024), a wildly inventive haunted-house film that turned the camera into a spectral observer—a ghost in the machine. Both were home-invasion thrillers for a digitally paranoid age, and both, in different ways, projected a dual fascination with the growing reach of modern surveillance technology: an Alexa-style virtual assistant in Kimi, a portable recording device in Presence.
While Black Bag is noticeably slicker and star-studded than its two predecessors, it also deals with the theme of home invasion. (The exact nature of the break-in, including the means, motive, and identities of the perpetrators, remains largely a mystery until the shocking final scene.) Meanwhile, the surveillance continues: all six of the film’s main characters work for the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre and are thus essentially professional voyeurs. “I can feel when you’re watching me,” Catherine tells her husband one evening, sensing his gaze as she prepares for dinner. George is, indeed, a master observer; he is celebrated as a ruthless master spy who once tracked down and cold-bloodedly exposed his own treasonous father. Recalling this unpleasant event, George simply replies, “I don’t like liars,” a line delivered by Fassbender with an icy dispassion that recalls the most famous George in the literary spy genre: John le Carré’s George Smiley, as cold in his emotions as he was magnificent in his craft.
Unlike Smiley, however, George Woodhouse is not married to a serial cheater. He and Catherine are as unlikely a picture of romantic stability as one can imagine in a profession that demands extreme, round-the-clock duplicity. George and Catherine do not compromise, they share: “black bag” is the shorthand they have coined for top-secret information too sensitive to share with each other. But of course, since “black bag” is a universal alibi, it is also the perfect cover for a spy planning to betray a spouse or a country. Early in the story, George is tasked with tracking down such a traitor by a senior NCSC official (Gustaf Skarsgård). There is a mole within the organization, and a deadly cyber-MacGuffin, a weapon called Severus, is in danger of falling into the wrong hands. So George sets out to catch the mole in his own unique, slightly sadistic style: he invites four colleagues, all suspects, to a dinner party at his and Catherine's fabulous London flat. There, under dim amber lighting, George spikes the food with lip-softening drugs and waits for the mole to give him a clue.
In a cleverly perverse twist, the guest list consists of two other couples, giving the inevitable dinner party shenanigans a touch of Edward Albee’s James Bond—let’s call it Who’s Afraid of Virginia W007f? There’s Zoe (Naomie Harris), who, as the staff psychiatrist, has access to almost everyone’s secrets, and her boyfriend James (Regé-Jean Page), an ambitious colonel who’s also one of her patients—an arrangement that feels untenable on many levels. The other two guests are an even more volatile duo: Clarissa (Marisa Abela), a young data scientist who gets mad quickly and furiously at her lover Freddy, a cynical older agent known for drinking and having sex beyond his means. Freddy is played, wonderfully, by Tom Burke; after his roles in The Souvenir and the detective series Strike, he’s clearly the best at drunken anger.
Sourse: newyorker.com
