Fidelity reigns where pressure does not. New configurations can stress-test fidelity and put it under pressure, but what does not bend will break. Steven Soderbergh’s second film of 2025, “Black Bag,” is his first effort to truly bend his sensibilities in years.
“Black Bag” follows George and Kathryn Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett), a married couple who work for the same British intelligence agency, as they unravel a conspiracy within the organization that threatens international security as well as the bonds of their marriage.
There hasn’t been a studio spy thriller this brisk and light on its feet in multiplexes for ages. The driving energy of the film is seductive and nimble while its 94-minute runtime adopts the sensibilities of its spy subjects. Soderbergh edited and shot the film himself, as he often does, and every flourish on display bears a verve that harkens to his polished “Out of Sight” and “Ocean’s” trilogy days. However, there’s a simplicity to the glamour of his filmmaking here that’s been missing from his recent efforts, and that simplicity plays like a stripped-down version of his older mainstream work.
It’s thrilling to watch a director as formally adept as Soderbergh regain a playfulness to accompany his innate curiosity. Soderbergh’s last few films, made during the pandemic and what were his Max Original years, had all been fun to watch, but they often felt reserved.
After a brief stint with retirement, Soderbergh came back out of the gates swinging with 2017’s “Logan Lucky” and some early pandemic heaters on Max such as “Let Them All Talk” and “No Sudden Move.” However, these lighter films with Max turned to more formal experimentation, recognizable as the efforts of an unchallenged and cooped up polymath. What Soderbergh has tapped into with “Black Bag” is his reserve of perfect Hollywood gloss which hides his formal fetishes freaky enough to thrill anyone who loves to watch as much as he does.
The relationship between camera and narrative in “Black Bag” is pared back all the way to the bare necessities of each image’s relation to its predecessor and successor. Soderbergh’s various home experiments, such as removing all sound from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and stripping it of color to see how it plays as a formal exercise, now feel like an academic’s research and “Black Bag” is his thesis.
The film’s narrative developments play out between the simplest of shots, unflashy but determined, all of which are in constant dialogue with their chronological neighbors in a manner so elegant and rare to genre fare these days. One moment late in the film cuts from Blanchett strutting in a divine leather coat to Pierce Brosnan’s Arthur Steiglitz swaggering about in a double-breasted suit, and that cut alone, taking so much joy from its emphasis on aesthetic splendor and narrative suggestion at once, feels more assured than many films’ entire runtimes.
Soderbergh’s greatest tools to communicate the complexities of David Koepp’s economic yet knotty script are his actors’ eyes, the windows to their souls. Soderbergh adoringly showcases his collaborators’ talents here and that love fuels the film’s jazzy mood and peppy step. David Holmes’s score is refreshingly bouncy and the ensemble is a gorgeous bunch, each member bringing a different flavor of allure and espionage to the table.
Blanchett and Fassbender are magnetic on any given day, but the quiet eroticism they channel between each other here as the world’s most competent and fiercely loyal couple could power a city. Kathryn says to George early in the film, “I can tell when you’re watching me. I like it.” Despite the script being Koepp’s, that line feels like an admission right from the man behind the curtain.
The devil is in the details. This adage goes for both filmmaking and spycraft, each their own meticulous and arduous process where even one misstep can derail an entire operation. Soderbergh takes great joy in filming that process while every detail and mystery that comes to the fore is presented as a new challenge. Sometimes those challenges are marital, others are espionage, but laying out all the cards is the only way through.
Both institutions at the center of “Black Bag,” intelligence and marriage, hinge upon loyalty only being proven through the long game of intently watching and listening. Spycraft is nothing if not voyeuristic, and every audience needs a show. Soderbergh seems delighted to provide one of the highest quality. “Black Bag” is now playing in theaters everywhere.
