“When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?”
God willing, I’ll live long enough to retire. And God willing, my eventual retirement will be as productive as Steven Soderbergh’s, which at this point is nearly as fruitful (if not quite as high caliber) as the main sweep of his career as a filmmaker. The first of two 2025 releases, Black Bag finds the maestro in comfortable territory, helming an espionage thriller of unique proportions, penned by David Koepp (Carlito’s Way, Kimi), largely focused on two dinners hosted by a husband-wife spy duo (Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett) and their MI6 colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page) so the husband can sniff out the traitor among them and save the world from a MacGuffin. Koepp’s script mercifully wastes no time informing the protagonist that his wife is a suspect, and so the bulk of the runtime is given over to subtly probing conversations, calculated risks, and sifting through evidence—legitimate, planted, red herring?—as the dutiful and diligent interrogator seeks to protect his country and his family.
Unique in that its central romance is totally licit, with the villains’ plot failing primarily due to their infidelities, the film trots out a few moral conundrums to play with, all stemming from the fact that intelligence officers’ jobs necessitate a straightfaced dishonesty that erodes their ability to seek truth and play fairly in their personal lives, and its value is enhanced by Soderbergh’s taut production, efficiently working through an entertaining script and its juicy, almost screwball dialogue with a skilled group of actors (Pierce Brosnan has a good cameo) and a proficient crew not prone to showmanship but rather using deliberate, understated film style to emphasize the storytelling.
Like many of his post-faux-retirement films, Black Bag won’t set the world on fire but it is sturdy, reliable, concise filmmaking equally indebted to archetypal Agatha Christie and John le Carré stories and classic paranoid thrillers like Klute (1971) and 3 Days of the Condor (1975) and made in defiance of the bloated and overstuffed productions in cinemas today; a suspenseful and romantic spy pic with nary a car chase, shootout, nor a steamy sex scene in sight.