Review: Black Bag (2025)

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Steven Soderbergh is a gifted technical filmmaker who sometimes gets too distracted by his own experimental ambitions. This can often make his movies seem more like exercises than entertainments, even if the technical aspects of the films, including cinematography and editing, are typically excellent. Luckily, he tends to operate according to a “one for them, one for me” ethos and his spy thriller, Black Bag, is an example of how fun Soderbergh movies can be when he’s doing one for “them,” especially when working with a screenwriter like David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man). In Black Bag, Soderbergh lets convention drive his narrative more than experimentation. As a result, Black Bag is more fun than anything Soderbergh’s made in the past decade, an engaging thriller that runs only 94 minutes and keeps us entertained with its narrative efficiency, chilly performances, and blend of spy and whodunnit conventions.

The film follows married British spies, George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), who find themselves at opposite ends of an espionage investigation when a top-secret computer program, Severus, leaks to rival nations. George has to figure out who leaked the program and Kathryn is one of the suspects, along with several of their agency colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page). The entire film hinges on the question of whether absolute honesty and trust can exist in a marriage where both spouses are spies.

It’s known throughout the agency that George and Kathryn are a committed couple, unlike most of their colleagues. Early on, George’s supervisor hilariously remarks to him that “Not everyone aspires to your flagrant monogamy,” which speaks to the film’s tone and the assumptions of the viewer. Are they truly faithful to each other? Is Kathryn a traitor? If not, who is?

In the first act, David Koepp’s script plays more as a whodunnit than a spy thriller. To feel out the suspects, George invites them over for a dinner party, drugging the chana masala with truth serum before everyone arrives. The ensuing dinner has everyone air their professional and personal frustrations and helps George create an action plan. The sequence is long and catty, with witty and snide conversations at a dimly-lit dinner table. Tom Burke is especially memorable here as the rakish Freddie, a philandering lush who is ironically more trustworthy due to the transparency of his infidelities. You wonder whether George is going to spring a trap on these characters then and there, but he’s not Hercule Poirot and the film eventually extends the investigation outward, until it seems more and more likely that Kathryn is the leak.

The film’s tension plays on this possibility of Kathryn’s betrayal, dovetailing with the movie’s investigations of marriage. It’s going too far to say that Black Bag is more a marriage drama than a spy film, but focusing on the centrality of honesty to a healthy marriage does reveal truth about relationships while also investing us in the characters and the sustenance of their onscreen relationship. It helps that Fassbender and Blanchett are on the same wavelength here, playing icy and cool in most scenes, while being intensely infatuated with each other in intimate scenes together.

They also match Soderbergh’s visual style, which is subdued, cool, punctuated by bursts of warmth amidst the overall bluish palette. As the film’s narrative progresses, it shifts from Agatha Christie to John le Carré territory, which clarifies the spy approach of tense conversations, literal spying, and little-to-no shootouts or action sequences like you’d get in a James Bond film. The le Carré connection is even evident in the visual approach, too, as the preponderance of browns, blown-out overhead lighting, and extreme shadows in the background recall British television productions of the 1970s and 1980s, such as all those le Carré adaptations. Soderbergh is too much of a movie nerd for this not to be deliberate. It’s fitting, matching the tone of the performances and visuals with the subject matter.

What keeps Black Bag from being something more than good fun is that it ultimately lacks much overall tension, even if tensions pop up moment-to-moment. Individual sequences are thrilling, especially tense conversations and anytime Pierce Brosnan shows up as the untrustworthy agency boss, but there are no showstoppers here, no chases that get your blood pumping or surveillance sequences that take your breath away through their suspense. It’s all engaging, but light, which, considering that many of Soderbergh’s recent films lack even modest narrative engagement, is enough to warrant a hearty recommendation.

7 out of 10

Black Bag (2025, USA)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by David Koepp; starring Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan.

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