Black Bag Review

Black Bag opens in theaters Friday, March 14.

Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp make one hell of a creative pair. After the paranoid pandemic thriller KIMI and the paranormal first-person-POV drama Presence, their latest collaboration, Black Bag, is an equally skillful melding of genre and style, mapping a web of romantic entanglements onto the espionage genre. Appropriate for this dynamic duo, it’s a movie about partnership: When high-ranking British intelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is tipped off about a potential turncoat, his short list of suspects happens to include his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). A stylish and delightfully tongue-in-cheek whodunnit rooted in questions of marital trust ensues.

When George is handed a list of names by a contact one evening, a series of sly games begins to unfold. The list contains five possible suspects responsible for stealing a potentially deadly software called Severus; their ranks include not only Kathryn, but some of the couple’s closest confidants and acquaintances at the National Cyber Security Centre, or NCSC. As it happens, the other four potential traitors are a pair of couples: rising hotshot James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and his sharp-tongued psychiatrist girlfriend, Dr. Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris) and married, middle-aged analyst Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and his younger mistress, the dangerously frank satellite reconnoiter Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela). George’s search is driven by his disdain for liars – especially in matters of love and marriage – making his subtle interrogations of his philandering friends during a dinner party a wry treat. It helps that they’re liquored up, and that their channa masala may have been spiked with truth serum.

Fortunately for us, the answers don’t all present themselves at once. For George, it’s a matter of discerning information bit by bit over several days. He gains leverage by meddling in each relationship, often to hilarious results. However, the further he goes down the rabbit hole, the less likely he is to enjoy what he finds, when signs begin pointing most clearly towards his wife. And that’s all merely in the first act of Black Bag. What’s in store from that point forward are numerous twists and turns, each more enticing than the last, as Soderbergh lures us deeper into an often dryly humorous (and extremely thinly veiled) spy-movie metaphor for domesticity.

These aren’t your run-of-the-mill movie spooks working at MI6; they gather intelligence from technology, rather than scrapping and/or sleeping with targets, and they spend their mornings in sterile office rooms surrounded by computers. This doesn’t make them any less suave or sexy (Soderbergh knows full well the expectations of the genre), but it does mean their tools aren’t usually guns and fists. For the most part, their methods involve manipulation and quiet sleuthing, the results of which can be quite droll when the central question becomes the degree to which George is willing to surveil his own wife while tugging at various, complicated threads. Fassbender has the lion’s share of the screen time, and he delivers a wonderfully calculated performance that begins in a state of centered repose. When this sense of control begins to slip from his grasp, we see it on his face. From there on out, it feels like anything could happen.

There are no such control problems for Soderbergh. Once again acting as his own editor and cinematographer (under the names Mary Ann Bernard and Peter Andrews, respectively) he exhibits immense formal poise in every scene. And yet, he allows each scenario to play out with a sense of conversational fluidity despite everyone’s stilted demeanor, as though the spirit of Robert Altman had briefly possessed an obsessive perfectionist like David Fincher. Much like the act of espionage, everything is precisely planned to the letter, but it also feels entirely spontaneous – and it’s made all the more alluring by the hazy, gas lamp wash in every frame. There’s rarely a moment when light sources aren’t visible on camera, emitting a blurry, obfuscating haze. They make the images pop, but never overwhelm them, allowing the ensemble (which also includes a former Bond, Pierce Brosnan, playing George’s intelligence chief) to dictate the rhythm and framing.

The result is a winding, oblique espionage drama that plays out like a heterosexual Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Despite its mounting complications, it remains far more about its characters and their interpersonal dynamics than the larger geopolitics at play. These are practically an afterthought, making room for one of Soderbergh’s most clockwork films to date: a snappy, self-assured, compact, and delightfully pulpy drama in the body of something slick and prestigious.