‘Black Bag review: suave, silly and sexually-charged marital spy thriller

You can always rely on Steven Soderbergh. The indie pioneer turned Hollywood workhorse “retired” for about five minutes back in 2013, then decided to make a new film every single year instead. Moving without stopping between gangsters (2021’s No Sudden Move), evil tech companies (2022’s Kimi), dry humping (2023’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance) and ghosts (2024’s Presence), his latest sees him tackling spies with a fun, old-school espionage thriller.

We open on Michael Fassbender’s buttoned-up British spook being told that he has a mole to root out. One of his five colleagues has secretly sold out their own agency and a nuclear thingamabob has gone missing. No one is better at detecting a lie because no one else is half as cold – except maybe his wife (Cate Blanchett), who happens to be one of the suspects.

A dinner party is arranged, the Chana Masala curry is spiked with truth serum, sex secrets are spilled and someone gets a steak knife through the hand. What would have made an amazing, high-stakes episode of The Traitors takes a swift left turn and we’re straight into the next great idea folded neatly inside Soderbergh’s Black Bag. It’s a marriage drama, corporate comedy, domestic farce and international surveillance thriller in a tight 90-minute package.

Held up by Fassbender and Blanchett’s perfectly rigid performances – both as bottled-up, calculating and sexually charged as each other – the film smartly throws all the realism out the window to linger over their every look and line instead. Everyone else in the solid cast tries hard to keep up (some manage it better than others, with Tom Burke running a close third) but this isn’t a film about spies and nuclear shit, it’s about Michael Fassbender looking at Cate Blanchett like he thinks he knows what she thinks he knows.

The stiffness will be off-putting for some because no one actually talks like them, but others will find the old-fashioned edge wonderfully charming. One terrific scene sees Fassbender sitting motionless in a cinema while everyone else jumps at a horror film – he’s there to see if his wife is lying about not having already seen it, but he’s also there so we can see just how much of a weird robot he really is. It’s the best idea Alfred Hitchcock never had.

And it’s funny, too. Few other films could possibly pull off a 10-minute polygraph test scene and have it feel quite so hilarious and tense at the same time. By the time everyone’s back at the roundtable for the slightly too-tidy finale, it’s impossible to know whether to laugh or gasp.

The momentum dips at times and some of the supports let the leads down, but Black Bag mostly runs like clockwork – a sleek, witty, rock-solid exercise in restraint; and yet another chance for Soderbergh to prove just how versatile he really is. Up next, Planet Kill…