What does all that spying do to spies? That’s Black Bag in a neat explicatory parcel, a Steven Soderbergh movie that mixes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with the Michael Caine Harry Palmer films – or so say Soderbergh and writer David Koepp.
But there’s John Le Carré in there as well. And as this densely packed, forensic examination of the spy psyche eases onto its queasy final straight, the comparisons with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy become unavoidable.
Soderbergh opens with a long, glam tracking shot following Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse into a bar and then down and back up some stairs where, in wham-bam plotting, Koepp lays out the whole film in one tiny scene. Here is a list with five of your fellow spies’ names on it, says the man Woodhouse is meeting, one of them is a traitor… and your wife’s name is on the list. The Maguffin: missing tech. A Stuxnet polymorph someone may have sold to the enemy is mentioned once, so fleetingly it’s obvious that neither Soderbergh or Koepp thinks it matters.
Plot and theme established – loyalty, but to who or what? – Soderbergh takes us into the first of several exquisite set pieces. A dinner party at the fabulous home of George and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). Aping Harry Palmer, George wears black-rimmed spectacles and is a dervish on the chopping board. Aping Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Koepp and Soderbergh make this dinner party an incendiary affair. There is much shouting, much heat. The film ends with another dinner party – same house, same guests – though this time it’s light rather than heat that’s the main course.
In between Fassbender acts as a detective, testing his wife and his colleagues and their use or misuse of the “black bag” – the metaphorical place where stuff is put which cannot be discussed for reasons of state security, not among fellow spies, not between intimates. We are told that George is such a professional that he once shopped his father, also a spy.
Fassbender’s playing of this strange man makes that plausible. He’s comically clamped, halfway between Alec Guinness’s watchful George Smiley and the highly intelligent robot Fassbender played in Alien: Covenant. As for the other people on the list, Freddie (Tom Burke), Clarissa (Marisa Abela, superb), James (Regé-Jean Page) and Zoe (Naomie Harris) are all characters who may have partaken of the black bag for all the wrong reasons. The only people with a solid relationship in this movie are George and Kathryn, and now that is under suspicion. What in god’s name does Kathryn get out of her marriage to this automaton?
Pierce Brosnan turns up, more Irish than usual, making it two James Bond refugees (along with Harris) but Black Bag is more East German spy movie in tone and effect – minimal, paranoid, un-gadgety – though its look is ironically anything but. Warm and organic, the colour orange all over the place, it’s a long way from Soderbergh’s usual chromium, clinical shooting style.
If you remember the disastrous Mr and Mrs Smith, an exercise in self-regard by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, this is like a successful version, a high-class Hollywood entertainment with brains. Koepp, the man who wrote the first Mission: Impossible nearly 30 years ago and in the interim has given us Panic Room, Spider-Man, Jurassic Park and a load of others, is a master of show-don’t-tell storytelling, and Soderbergh is a master of the look.
Together they weave quite a spell, superficially sleek, roiling beneath. It’s all highly assured, every corner tucked in, everything neatly crimped. Really it’s all very, very simple – who is it? Who is it?
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
