A Thriller That Knows Not to Overstay Its Welcome

Steven Soderbergh films are like buses: There’s always another one coming. This isn’t a complaint, exactly, but the director’s prolific nature is on my mind with each of his new projects—he released Presence two months ago, and he’s already got another one? How much effort could he have put into it? Black Bag, a taut spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, is an argument for the filmmaker’s ruthless efficiency. Yes, the speed with which Soderbergh has hopped from genre exercise to genre exercise of late is a little dizzying; he’s pumped out works of horror, romance, thriller, and comedy all since 2020. His skill with each, nonetheless, is hard to deny.

Black Bag, like the recent Soderbergh movies Presence and Kimi, was written by David Koepp; he’s a Hollywood stanchion who is best known for major blockbusters including Jurassic Park and Spider-Man. Now, though, Koepp is seemingly hell-bent on reviving the midsize feature that Hollywood has been missing. His latest collaboration with Soderbergh, a cat-and-mouse story about a married pair of spies, is a throwback in many ways—but its observations about the intrusive nature of espionage work on their lives feel sharply contemporary.

The setup is straightforward. The glamorous Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett) is a renowned British spy who is accused of being a double agent by an anonymous tipster. The big brass tasks the preening, excessively kempt George Woodhouse (Fassbender) with investigating her and some other colleagues in order to root out the traitor. There is a twist, of course: Kathryn and George are married. The mega-spies live together in a pristine London home that’s a den of class, sophistication, and potential sabotage. Soderbergh has found the two perfect actors for this scenario; they’re impressive yet impassive movie stars who look glamorous even if they’re parked behind a laptop. Their dazzling facades, however, hide unspoken darkness.

Blanchett serves glossy, Hollywood oomph, while Fassbender is playing a fussy, British spin on the hit-man character he portrayed so well in David Fincher’s The Killer. George is a major control freak whose freakery just might be getting the better of him. His favorite pastime, it seems, is inviting people over for dinner and dosing the dishes with a truth serum. (“Avoid the chana masala,” he warns his wife.) This is the informal version of administering lie-detector tests, his professional speciality. But despite being a top mole-hunter, George can’t take quite as brutal or direct an approach with his wife. Thus, he must resort to bouncing his suspicions off her co-workers—performed by a fine-tuned group of talented company players.

[Read: A movie about the perils of being a control freak]

Among them is Tom Burke (from The Souvenir and last year’s Furiosa) as an agent with a proclivity for infidelity and booze; and Marisa Abela (known for Industry and the recent Amy Winehouse biopic) as a tech wiz and his on-and-off love interest. Naomie Harris and Regé-Jean Page fill out the cast as more experienced agents growing tired of George’s parlor games, while Pierce Brosnan lurks in the background as a disapproving boss. Soderbergh wisely leverages everyone’s fame to further confuse the audience: Fassbender’s on-screen tendency toward villainous roles makes him a disorienting protagonist to root for, while Blanchett’s natural gravitas renders her difficult not to trust.

At a blissful 93 minutes long, Black Bag keeps audiences happily guessing before dropping its final reveals. Though it has the same intimacy of many a Soderbergh effort of late—he tends to work quickly to keep budgets low and attract big-name talent—the director manages to squeeze in a couple of globe-trotting moments for some visual panache. Yet these foreign missions are largely glimpsed as surveillance on a computer screen. Most of Black Bag is instead set in enclosed spaces: the oppressive blank offices of the British intelligence services everyone works for, or George and Kathryn’s seductive and candlelit home, a welcoming environment that quickly turns into a pit of vipers when all the spies sit down for a meal.

Will Soderbergh ever make another truly big movie? Black Bag had me thinking about some of his past hits, such as Ocean’s Eleven; these were large ensemble pieces that had proper scope to them. Black Bag is halfway there, although Soderbergh’s approach has an artfulness to it; he’s telling a sweeping story while keeping the excitement mostly confined. The result, while self-contained, is gripping, quietly sexy, and robustly acted. Plus, given the scarcity of films for grown-ups in theaters right now, I cannot complain about a good update on the drawing-room mystery. But maybe one day I’ll sit Soderbergh down, give him a heavy helping of George’s curried truth serum, and ask if he’d ever consider making a grand action epic again.