Black Bag (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Spouse Trap

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Director Steven Soderbergh has made many crime films over the course of his career, and they all have a different vibe, be it sexy (Out of Sight), pugnacious (The Limey), rambunctious (Logan Lucky), or affable (Ocean's Eleven). His new film Black Bag is elegant, filled with beautiful clothes, clean lines, and superb lighting. It's the director's third collaboration with blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp (after Kimi and Presence), and its setup is quite intriguing. Its development is enticingly complex. Its conclusion is rather simple, but it so thoroughly delivers the tingles, that it still feels like a rousing success.

Husband and wife team George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) are spies for England. Whenever either one of them has a top secret mission, the phrase "black bag" lets either of them know that they don't need to know. As the story begins, George is tasked with finding a mole in the organization. It could be one of five people, including Kathryn. George arranges to have a dinner party with all of them to begin to shake things up.

The guests include Freddie (Tom Burke) and Clarissa (Marisa Abela), who are a couple, and James (Regé-Jean Page) and Zoe (Naomie Harris), who are also a couple. George, who prides himself on his cooking, makes a glorious meal and spikes some of it with a truth drug. The talk turns vicious and the evening ends with someone being stabbed in the hand with a steak knife. George doesn't have any ideas yet, but knows to wait… and watch.

Meanwhile, George becomes suspicious that Kathryn has scheduled a trip to Zurich. The movie suggests that everyone in this insulated world ends up sleeping with one another — and cheating on one another — ramping up the idea of untrustworthiness. George uses illegal means to spy on Kathryn via a satellite. Unfortunately, doing so has interrupted a crucial op and some bad guys have escaped. (A deadly secret weapon is the movie's MacGuffin.) It begins to look as if George himself is also being set up. Is Kathryn responsible? Or are they both being manipulated? Will they betray one another?

These are all excellent questions, and Black Bag does a wonderful job of keeping them bouncing around in the air, kept aloft by a master juggler. Then, the filmmakers choose to end things in a most typical manner, a bit of a letdown, although still done with high style. Black Bag is one of those movies in which everything seems to have been put where it is for a specific reason. Not a hair is out of place. It keeps the intrigue going because of this imbalance: if everything is where it's supposed to be, then what, actually, is not where it's supposed to be?

Despite Soderbergh's different approaches, what all his movies have in common is a sense of adventurousness, a sense that there's still stuff left to be tried in cinema. The movie opens with a stellar one-take shot, and includes a teasing, chilly score by David Holmes (like someone running an ice cube up and down your back), and so many clever little touches in editing, sound design, and composition. It's a feast for cinema lovers, really. But just keep away from the chana marsala.