“One of the greatest compliments I ever got (well, it seemed like a compliment to me, anyway) was when Mr. Spielberg told me I’d missed my era as a screenwriter – that I would have had a ball in the 40s,” David Koepp once told the film scholar David Bordwell. He’s found the next best thing writing scripts directed by modern workflow gurus like David Fincher, and now the one-man studio Steven Soderbergh.
Koepp provides the devilishly efficient storytelling, in which every thread of plot is picked back up, every planted hint given space to blossom; the prolific Soderbergh, who acts as his own pseudonymous cinematographer and editor, provides the genius of the system. In recent years Koepp and Soderbergh have had a ball within the self-imposed constraints of Kimi (2022), a pandemic-era Rear Window riff, and Presence (2023), a domestic gothic. Black Bag, their third collaboration, expands beyond the new-style backlots of those predominantly single-location dramas, but retains their precision, and pleasingly gratuitous sense of gamesmanship.
In Black Bag, spy thriller and love story proceed in parallel. Cybersecurity agent George (Michael Fassbender) is informed of a security breach and given a list of five colleagues to look into, including his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), and two other romantically involved couples. The character name George could be a tribute to the cuckolded mole hunter George Smiley, but equally George and Kathryn echo George and Martha, the older marrieds from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) – though in Black Bag’s opening set piece, the hosts have two younger couples from work, instead of one, over for dinner and party games. Soderbergh’s screening log, which he publishes annually, does indeed reveal a viewing of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a few months before Black Bag began production in the tonier parts of London in May of 2024.
To the sounds of smooth jazz, over bowls of chana masala, George pokes at the suspected traitors to see what comes loose. Insecurities, infidelities, secret histories and sexual dysfunctions spill out, and blood eventually flows, as does rather too much wine – a very nice red being the truth serum of many a social occasion.
Here, marriage is a kind of performance – or possibly a cover story. Seemingly the perfect couple, George and Kathryn are subjects of both admiration and suspicion to observers outside the secure room of matrimony. High-tech and classic spycraft, from satellite surveillance to clandestine meetings, is applied in pursuit of both geopolitical bad actors and cheating paramours.
Koepp and Soderbergh toy with genre convention, such that even the exposition and symbolism is exultantly hammy. George frequently works on his assignment while fishing – but is each catch, release, or one that got away a clue to the mystery’s resolution, or a literal red herring? (And what does it mean that Pierce Brosnan, as Kathryn’s boss, has a taste for expensive, illegally fished omakase?)
The other two couples under suspicion, played by Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page, are sketched out through their hangups and hostilities, as revealed at dinner on Sunday night and in the office Monday morning. (The millennial-Gen Z cusper played by Abela has the least settled ideas about sex and professionalism, and the baby of the cast has commensurate fun with a character who becomes palpably aroused at the prospect of a polygraph examination.)
Fassbender’s clipped and pious honourable-schoolboy routine is apt for George, the doting husband of an older woman, played by Blanchett with cunning and expansive sensuality. George’s backstory – he spied on his philandering father, just like Koepp’s frequent collaborator Brian De Palma did as a boy – is called out by another character as Oedipal; the maternal half of the equation is left implicit.
The early part of Soderbergh’s 2024 screening log also shows Notorious (1946), which is hardly surprising. In Black Bag, as in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, espionage and romance are metaphors for each other, and they have similar geometries of duplicity and loyalty, secrecy and trust.
The film’s title references a term of art for top-secret information, such as a spouse’s whereabouts on a suspicious business trip – love is the ultimate macguffin, and clandestine activity is a bit of roleplay to keep things interesting. Assuming the mantle of a 1940s classic proves equally invigorating for Koepp and Soderbergh, who have given themselves interesting problems to solve and their performers sophisticated material to play.
► Black Bag is in UK cinemas 14 March.
