Steven Soderbergh’s modern Cold War thriller is one of the purest genre thrills you’ll get this year. Here’s our Black Bag review.
Every review of Black Bag – the latest spy thriller from director Steven Soderbergh – is going to start at the beginning. In a long, single shot, the back of Michael Fassbender’s head bobs into a pulsing London nightclub – the conspicuously clean kind with plentiful booths that exist only so this sort of meeting can happen in Soho on a Friday night.
Fassbender, obviously, is a spy, one working for a governmental intelligence agency that is nonetheless never referred to as MI6. His contact hands him a list of five names. One of them belongs to a mole. His wife (Cate Blanchett) is on the list. Find them, he’s told, or thousands of people will die. The plot might be Mr & Mrs Smith – but the style is cold hard Le Carré.
With Black Bag, Soderbergh is flying triumphantly in the face of modern Hollywood wisdom. For years the gritty spy genre has been the sole property of the TV industry; the twist presented here in the third sentence is one we can easily imagine as the cliffhanger closing an episode of Black Doves. But the Oceans’ director’s decision to wrestle the narrative back onto the big screen makes you wonder why hard political intrigue has been left out in the cold for so long. Efficiency is the watchword here, backed up by a 93-minute runtime and a drum-tight script with a pace that makes Crank look like Jeanne Dielman.
No sooner has George (Fassbender) accepted his mission than he and Kathryn (Blanchett) have invited the entire list round for a dinner party. Regé-Jean Page is the recently promoted office wunderkind; Tom Burke is the grizzled alcoholic he leapfrogged; Burke is currently seeing Marisa Abela’s IT whizz; they’re all seeing Naomie Harris’s office psychotherapist (albeit for different reasons). All, even George and Kathryn, have their secrets – whenever a personal question strays too close to forbidden knowledge, it’s met with two words: Black Bag.
It’s a narrative device that makes for a compelling mystery, but the film’s secret weapon is how it uses its title for far more than just plot. How can people wedded to their jobs build relationships when everyone they know is a professional liar? It’s a deeply human question resolved through covert meetings on benches and sarcastic comments in board rooms. Black Bag’s greatest achievement might just be making us care about a sextet of cold fish in suits and turtlenecks.
At the centre of it all, Fassbender and Blanchett lean into their ice-royalty personas to craft a believably chalk-and-cheese couple. The former, having clearly kidnapped Michael Caine’s stylist from 1965, is a soft-spoken polygraph expert who gets closest to anger when he splashes red wine on his shirtsleeve. The latter might be more relaxed on the surface, but proves just as much an enigma as her blank slate husband. It’s a pair of deliciously understated movie-star performances that prove magnetic whether both are on screen or apart.
Despite an unapologetically 60s tone (and attitude to mental wellbeing), the film still feels remarkably modern. References to real geopolitical events (the 2021 Myanmar coup, Putin’s Russia) which could easily date the dialogue instead feel remarkably of-the-moment. In fact, the 60s stylings – everything from Blanchett’s brown leather jacket to the inkling we might be on the verge of nuclear war – transfer to 2025 about as well as this paragraph’s construction implies.
And while the plot’s conclusion teeters on the verge of international espionage word salad, it’s remarkable how well Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp stick the landing. If you’re someone who has ever bemoaned the state of modern Hollywood – and let’s face it, who hasn’t – then this is the film you’ve been waiting for. Black Bag is a brilliantly constructed, narratively satisfying and clinically cool Cold War-style thriller. Sprint to see it on the big screen if you can.
Black Bag is in UK cinemas from the 14th March.
