Black Bag (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

With each new project, I'm increasingly grateful that Soderbergh didn't retire after all. His latest release, a spy thriller like few others, reminds us of his highly entertaining ability to cover familiar ground in a wildly unfamiliar way. Black Bag manages to turn a high-stakes story about international security, satellite surveillance, and eavesdropping with AI, and turn it into a tense dinner table drama about camaraderie and companionship. David Koepp's riveting screenplay takes special focus on a conspiracy to leak a top-secret software called Severus, which could apparently cause a nuclear meltdown and claim thousands of lives.

MI6 officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is given one week to locate and stop the leak; he narrows his list to five suspects and invites them over for dinner. Perhaps I should say, rather, that he invites four over for dinner; the fifth suspect is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), his personal and professional match in every way. The others include two couples, all British Intelligence agents of various temperaments and dispositions, and their dinner is a bit awkward; at least, it's a bit stilted and guarded between these folks with their stiff upper lips. But George has lightly drugged their meal to lower their inhibitions with the intention of getting someone loose enough to reveal their secret. One couple is fiery Freddie (Tom Burke), angry about not getting promoted, and satellite image specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela), who is his subordinate. The other is Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and the agency psychiatrist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris). Despite the revelation that Freddie has been cheating on Clarissa, causing her to stab his hand with her cutlery, and some fractures in their relationships generally, George learns nothing of value.

With less than a week to go, and with his own supervisor found mysteriously dead, George refocuses attention on his wife, resorting to secretive surveillance of Kathryn on one of her missions. Kathryn suspects their boss (Pierce Brosnan) of attempting to destabilize Russia at any cost, and leaks the Russian operatives' location to a CIA contact, resulting in their annihilation from a drone strike. Meanwhile, George issues polygraph tests to his suspects; based on their respective intel, George and Kathryn conclude that they are being set up and decide to host another little dinner party.

If you know me, you know I love a dramatized dinner party gone wrong. You don't often see these in espionage thrillers, but in this Koepp/Soderbergh project, we get two! As bookends of what is otherwise an engaging but somewhat rote spy story, these sequences frame the whole affair as one of intimate, psychological proportions. We get to know these characters as perfection-oriented, ambitious professionals and as socially icy Brits in what could be an awkward domestic setting. That drastically changes our opinions of them once the game is afoot. As we follow George, primarily, we see his calculated method of putting pressure on each suspect to try and elicit their secrets; Fassbender's typically masterful, subtle performance is key here in ensuring that we trust him without his having to say much.

As his second release this year already, Soderbergh is showing no sign of slowing down or of being predictable in his choices of cinematic topics. This film, understated as it can feel, nevertheless features speedy edits and cool camera tricks such as shifting focus mid-shot and dousing everything in soft lighting to create a unique visual appeal to the proceedings. This helps the dinner scenes best, making things feel natural and nice even as we wait for the traitor to erupt. It also helps us trust -- and then not trust, and then trust again -- George's relationship with Kathryn, as their sexual chemistry and cerebral gameplay are showcased only briefly but highly effectively. And despite her role as a sort of secondary character, Blanchett matches Fassbender point for point, performing Kathryn with a glamorous, ballsy delivery that makes the character have an edge you don't usually see in films like these. He lays a careful trap and waits for his prey; she will unapologetically push people to see which one takes the bait. The middle act of the film works because of Blanchett's choices: she is clearly the only character in the film who could actually be outsmarting George.

Koepp's fraught dialogue and Soderbergh's uncanny knack for unique genre twists combine here in a heady test of smarts that is over almost too quickly. I could have lived in this world a little longer. Brosnan is having fun as a former James Bond who is a bit insecure professionally, and Harris is particularly delicious to watch in her equally cerebral and emotionally complex position as the group's therapist. While the final reveal could delight or upset genre fans, it strikes a memorable balance of tonal uplift and satisfying closure that we don't often see in such films.