Review: Black Bag

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Steven Soderbergh's lean, twisty "Black Bag" is my favorite of the director's two 2025 first-quarter movies - his other, the first-person ghost story "Presence," was also of interest. The picture, which clocks in at just above 90 minutes, is an espionage thriller and dissection of a marriage with almost no fat and superb leading performances by the always reliable Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.

The film gets right down to business as spy George (Fassbender) is given a tip-off that there's a traitor in his organization and he receives a list that includes five names - one of whom is his wife, Kathryn (Blanchett). Other names on the list include Freddie (Tom Burke), a cocky friend whom George passed over for a promotion; Burke's date, a young surveillance worker named Clarissa (Marisa Abela); Zoe, a psychiatrist for the organization (Naomie Harris); and James (Rege-Jean Page), a go-getter who received the aforementioned promotion and the boyfriend of Zoe.

After the tip-off, George plans a dinner party in which he invites all of the suspects and slips a little truth serum into the food. He plays a game with them in which he asks each person to come up with a resolution for the person sitting to the right of them. This causes a scene when Clarissa takes Freddie to task over his cheating. Zoe and James also strike a cold tone with each other.

Meanwhile, although it appears that George is investigating his own wife, it also hints that he might be doing so not so much to out her as the possible traitor - and the evidence, at this point, seems to suggest that she's the most likely one to fit the bill - but to figure out how to protect her. Pierce Brosnan plays the head of the British spy agency where all of the characters work, and he is leading the charge to figure out who the mole is.

The traitor in the organization has supposedly stolen and attempted to sell information about a program known as Severus that can apparently cause a country's meltdown by triggering a nuclear reactor. In this case, it has been purchased by Russian dissidents who want to use it against Russia, but doing so would lead to the death of many innocent people. 

While "Black Bag" is a sleek spy thriller, it is also an engaging film about a marriage - in this case, one in which both spouses are involved in a high-stakes line of business in which lying comes second-hand and trust can be dangerous. Whenever one of the characters has to run off for an assignment that's top secret, the explanation for their absence is "black bag," which is seemingly spy lingo to notify the other person that they can't divulge any information.

The film begins with a dinner scene and ends with what appears to be another, although George assembles the same characters instead for the purpose of playing a game. The film ends on a more playful note and a hint that what we should have been focusing on the entire time in "Black Bag" was less the labyrinthine plot mechanics revolving around Severus and more George and Kathryn's marriage. 

This makes Soderbergh's film stand out in this particular genre. This is a film more interested in the nature of truth and fabrication in the relationships involving all of the picture's principle characters, but most notably George and Kathryn, than it is being your typical spy movie. As such, "Black Bag" is an engaging, well acted, and unique spin on this genre.