Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan
Rating: (M)
★★★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
Ever the prolific film-maker, Steven Soderbergh delivers his second film of 2025 — Black Bag (Rialto, Reading, Metro) — before the year is even a quarter through.
A married pair of intelligence agents, one suspecting the other of international crimes that could threaten the lives of thousands, navigate the volatile nature of their espionage-based work in their personal lives.
Black Bag is a thriller that operates on two levels — both as a taut conspiracy thriller and a psychological meditation on trust and workplace relationships. Throughout the film’s duration, this manifests in an abundance of tense, dialogue-laden, quick-cut edited set pieces — drunken and drugged dinner party games, a last-second hacked satellite, and an anxious polygraph test, to name a few.
A movie about relationships, Black Bag is incredibly romantic — there is a push/pull tension of intimately knowing your partner and agonising over the possibility that they could be keeping geopolitically sensitive secrets from you. The private, alienating nature of their work sets the table for this film to become a workplace comedy on how two people can sustain a marriage through circumstances such as these.
The film’s conceit blows this up — the "black bag" — a conversational veto deployed by intelligence operatives in the firm, each having their own confidential missions (or dirty baggage) to keep secret from others.
Between "black bags" and the thematic psychological focus, Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp revamp the conventional spy thriller, extrapolating the casual and subtextual genre characteristics and interrogating them through their superbly stylised perspective.
The clean camera movement, electric scoring, brushstroke title cards, witty scriptwriting, and a stellar cast are customary of Steven Soderbergh — one of cinema’s working greats.
