Melissa Anderson
Sex, lie detectors, and national security: in Steven Soderbergh’s latest, the intrigue of espionage is matched by the mysteries of marriage.
Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse in Black Bag. Photo: Claudette Barius / Focus Features. © Focus Features.
Black Bag, directed by Steven Soderbergh,
now in theaters
• • •
It’s rare for a director to release two films in the same year, rarer still two films in the same quarter—and perhaps unprecedented that both should be so satisfying. Opening in January, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence (which premiered at Sundance in 2024) was a bright spot in a month notorious for being a hazmat zone of cinema effluvia; in my 4Columns review, I hailed the movie as “a taut, confident, superbly executed paranormal thriller” and “a genre film invigorated by astute, nondidactic social studies.” Switch out “paranormal” for “spy,” and the same words apply to Black Bag, nominally a tale of espionage and treason but, more piquantly, a dissection of heterosexual coupledom.
Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse, Tom Burke as Freddie Smalls, and Pierce Brosnan as Arthur Stieglitz in Black Bag. Photo: Claudette Barius / Focus Features. © Focus Features.
Black Bag is Soderbergh’s third collaboration with screenwriter David Koepp, following Presence and 2022’s KIMI. The director’s latest is set in London, where most of Soderbergh’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023) took place—and where it flailed and sputtered out. This time, the city finds the filmmaker working with utmost precision, evident from the very first scene. In one fluid long take, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), shot from the back, enters a club in the posh Mayfair district, descends the stairs, winds his way through the bar, arrives at the dance floor, and, locating Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), the man he came to see, in the VIP section behind the DJ booth, ascends another set of stairs with this fellow out into the street. (Once again, Soderbergh, under the name Peter Andrews, serves as his own cinematographer, and, under Mary Ann Bernard, his own editor.)
Naomie Harris as Dr. Zoe Vaughn and Cate Blanchett as Kathryn St. Jean in Black Bag. Photo: Claudette Barius / Focus Features. © Focus Features.
Both men work for the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (an actual entity, new to me). Meacham has given George, a senior-level operative, a list with the names of five NCSC colleagues; all are suspected of being the traitor who stole a highly classified, cataclysmic malware. On that list appears Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), also among the organization’s upper echelon—she has her sights on the top spot, currently occupied by pin-striped toff Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan)—and George’s beloved wife. The couple’s perfect marriage, it turns out, is a source of great envy, and sometimes utter disdain, among the NCSC staff (“Not everyone aspires to your flagrant monogamy, George,” sniffs Meacham, a chronic philanderer, like, it would seem, the majority of those on the company payroll). Though George’s uxoriousness may equal, if not outweigh, his loyalty to his post and country, the upstanding agent assures Meacham he’ll find the mole in a week.
Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse and Marisa Abela as Clarissa Dubose in Black Bag. Photo: Claudette Barius / Focus Features. © Focus Features.
To do so, he concocts a counterespionage scheme more indebted to Edward Albee than Ian Fleming, a plan that delights Kathryn, who knows that her spouse has been tasked with finding the bad actor but has no idea she’s under suspicion (or at least pretends she doesn’t). The four other potential rats are invited to George and Kathryn’s home for dinner. This quartet consists of two couples: twentysomething Clarissa (Marisa Abela) is in a relationship, soon to enter its second year, with the older Freddie (Tom Burke), a dipsomaniac still sore over the fact that he lost a promotion to James (Regé-Jean Page), who recently began dating Zoe (Naomie Harris), the staff psychiatrist. (I can only assume that NCSC HR has lax policies regarding interoffice romance.) George has devised a parlor game for his guests: each must go around the table and offer a resolution for the person seated to their right, an exercise that devolves into emotional bedlam and a flesh wound.
Regé-Jean Page as Col. James Stokes, Naomie Harris as Dr. Zoe Vaughn, Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse, Cate Blanchett as Kathryn St. Jean, Tom Burke as Freddie Smalls, and Marisa Abela as Clarissa Dubose in Black Bag. Photo: Claudette Barius / Focus Features. © Focus Features.
While George’s domestic skulduggery unearths no air-tight proof of anyone’s guilt or innocence, the fissures in each dyad and the flaws in each individual set in motion a plot that grows increasingly labyrinthine—one that took me two viewings to even remotely grasp and that I couldn’t begin to recapitulate semi-coherently. But the cloak-and-dagger narrative, no matter how befuddling, unspools with such elegant momentum that its intricacies add to the film’s allure. Moreover, these details aren’t Black Bag’s most crucial element. The spycraft specifics—involving a trip to Zurich, the Russia–Ukraine war, Myanmar, a movie-ticket stub, Catholic guilt, and an offshore account with seven million pounds—remain secondary to the more intriguing examination of George and Kathryn’s marriage and the responses it educes in others less felicitously matched.
Cate Blanchett as Kathryn St. Jean in Black Bag. Photo: Claudette Barius / Focus Features. © Focus Features.
Aptly, Blanchett’s character is first introduced being surveilled: George, taking a break from mincing garlic and ginger before their dinner guests arrive, admires his wife from their bedroom doorway as she gets dressed. “I can tell when you’re watching me,” she coos. “I like it.” But Kathryn—whose eyes never leave the mirror when she says this to her treasured spouse, her comment delivered as she buttons up her smart high-waisted trousers, an action she completes with a flourish of hands to hips—seems to like watching herself more. How she responds hints that while the affection (and lust; George can never get to bed fast enough for Kathryn) between these two elite spooks cannot be denied, he is more besotted with her than she with him—an imbalance never commented on but that hangs in the air all the same. (Another thing that hangs, all too distractingly: Blanchett’s unappealing long brown wig, a tonsorial abomination that gets in the way of the actress’s otherwise kicky performance, her gusto shared by her castmates in this lively ensemble piece.) The disparity is painfully evident when George, already missing his wife terribly, wishes safe travels to Kathryn, headed out the door to the airport for an undisclosed work assignment. She turns back, smiles, waits a beat, and says, “Love you”—perhaps the worst boilerplate response in the English language, its excised personal pronoun a stinging, weaponized omission.
Cate Blanchett as Kathryn St. Jean and Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse in Black Bag. Photo: Claudette Barius / Focus Features. © Focus Features.
These are private moments, never observed by George and Kathryn’s colleagues, who, wallowing in their own romantic misery, would appear to want nothing more than to snuff out their conjugal happiness. Some go about this overtly, as wildly flirtatious Clarissa does during a supper conversation regarding George’s infallibility in administering lie-detector tests. “When are you going to poly me, George?” she asks, though the suspended suffix isn’t “-graph” so much as “-cule” or “-amory.” Others may be so monomaniacally focused on sundering this blissful union that they will stealthily instigate geopolitical mayhem and mass-scale death to do so.
While it may be the height of banality to say that no one really knows what goes on between a couple, Black Bag slyly takes this truism one step further, suggesting that not even those enjoying a fulfilling partnership wholly understand the dynamics they enact. To be with another person, whether that arrangement brings joy or despair, will always entail some level of psy-ops.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.