Black Bag is about as good as mainstream filmmaking gets

If you would like to see that rarest of endangered species — a smart, witty and original 90-minute thriller aimed at adults — then stop reading this review immediately and go and see Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. It is a film that is probably best enjoyed by going in entirely blind, where the bare bones of the premise, revolving around a husband-and-wife pair of British spies who find themselves under suspicion of treachery, possibly by one another, is all you need to know. Yet if you need further convincing, then rest assured that this a one-of-a-kind blend of Mission: Impossible, Private Lives and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith thrown into the mix, to season.

The marquee appeal for many will be the chance to see Michael Fassbender, recently returned to theaters after a lengthy hiatus driving Formula 1 cars, starring opposite Cate Blanchett. They play George and Kathryn, a long-married couple who manage to combine their top-secret espionage jobs in the “National Cyber Security Center” with a giddy devotion to one another. (Tellingly, there are no children.) Any professional secrets that either wishes to keep are simply referred to by the film’s title — a demarcation of professional and personal boundaries.

When it becomes incumbent on George to investigate the identity of a mole within his department, he rounds up the usual suspects, entertainingly played by an all-star cast. They include Naomie Harris’s God-fearing shrink Dr. Vaughan, Regé-Jean Page’s apparent straight-arrow Stokes, Marisa Abela’s coquettish junior operative Clarissa and, uproariously, Tom Burke’s shambling but strangely seductive Smalls.

The film sets out its stall early in the first act, when George assembles the potential double agents for a dinner party in his and Kathryn’s sumptuously furnished (and presumably architect-designed) home; the issue of how two civil servants would afford the countless millions it would cost lays unresolved until the end of the film, when a splendid curtain line hints at an explanation. The dinner looks sumptuous, but — in that perilous development known to any bourgeois dining table — the chana masala has been dosed with truth serum, and a round of revelations, psychological and sexual alike, becomes progressively more tense until a steak knife is pressed into play. And then the fun can truly begin.

There is a McGuffin, for those who care about such things, in the form of a computer program named Severus, which will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands if it is not recovered. Soderbergh and Koepp, however, are barely interested in this, save as a plot device to explore the film’s greater questions. These include, in no particular order, whether lying in the service of your country for a living will eventually mean that you lie to all those around you as a reflex action, whether a relationship with someone you cannot trust is excitingly licentious or systematically compromised and whether working as a spy means that you’re going to be almost outrageously well-tailored. The couture porn reaches its peak late in the film when Pierce Brosnan, wittily cast as the head of the bureau, walks through Marylebone in the most immaculate Savile Row suit you can imagine, before walking into a clandestine restaurant and tucking into a grim, expensive dish of ikizukuri, live fish left gulping on the plate while it’s eaten. Similarities between it and the spies left on the hook are clearly intentional.

This is Soderbergh’s first truly mainstream picture since Side Effects in 2013, and probably his most entertaining and accomplished film since Ocean’s Eleven all the way back in 2001. Fassbender, clad in Harry Palmer spectacles and a selection of black turtlenecks, makes doing very little seem the most charismatic and sexy thing in the world — see how Abela’s character squirms with orgasmic pleasure at the thought of his making her take a polygraph test — and he’s matched beautifully by Blanchett, relishing the opportunity to play a femme fatale of the kind that Katherine Hepburn or Rita Hayworth would once have excelled at. The script’s nods — at one point explicit — to Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — may be a little too on-the-nose for the cognoscenti, but for the rest of us, this is about as good as mainstream filmmaking gets, Black Bag has to be an immediate contender for one of the best films of 2025, even this early in the year. See it, now.