You May Have Missed: Black Bag (Dir Steven Soderberg, 1h34m, 2025)

As I've alluded to in the past, a divide has opened up, at least in American cinema. On the one hand, there are the $200, $250, and increasingly $300 million plus movies-what we would call the blockbuster and the tentpole release. On the other, the micro-budget movie, the sub $1 million gang, where either word of mouth, smart marketing, and the ability to release a film online or bypass the cinema system entirely (see last year's Hundreds of Beavers) allow a low-budget movie to reach wide audiences. In the middle used to be the mid budget film, the $20-50 million pictures, the proving grounds of directors, or where established film-makers could experiment without undue interference of the studio. Too often now these are the preserve of streaming, the theatrical releases of the mid-budget movie now few and far between.

Such a film is Steven Soderbergh's taut and pacey (at just an hour and a half) spy vs. spy thriller, Black Bag. Following a week in the life of married spies George and Kathryn Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett), as they hunt for a mole inside their unnamed organisation, who has stolen a top-secret and highly dangerous weapon. This is Soderberg's usual style, his focus on slick presentation, the fast moving pieces that made his Ocean's trilogy compelling viewing, and twists on the familiar, in this case, the spy thriller, a heavily-picked over genre, on the intimate scale of something akin to Neil Simon's play, The Dinner Party, as the Woodhouses race time and their own undoing to capture the leaker.

A Seat at the Table: Black Bag makes the most of its cast and its bookending dinner table scenes to set up a smart spy thriller

Certainly, none of Soderbergh's style, pared back as it has been in his more recent films, is lost in this more intimate piece of cinema: its opening shot following Fassbender through the streets of London in a shot that lingers behind him, at once voyeuristic and surveilling, as he descends, accompanied with the pulsing score by David Holmes, into a club, to be assigned his mission. It is here that George is confronted by the possibility of a mole, and that his wife, Kathryn is a possible suspect, and from here the film arrives at its first of two dinner scenes. This is a surprisingly archaic, very stage-like scene, beginning with George, a la Caine's secret agent, Harry Palmer, cooking: the sensibilites Len Deighton's Action Cookbook brought into the 21st Century and into this new age of the spy.

Yet it feels, via Soderbergh acting, as he often does, as his DoP, like something brimming with style, which continues into our protagonists, the Bond-esque George and the steely Kathryn making a superb powercouple. With vignettes of the rest of the guests assembling at a nearby pub, so we are introduced to the list of suspects George and Kathryn - Blanchett is by no means the junior party in this film, and ably plays foil to her husband as the plot unravels - are having for dinner. These range from the brusque case officer Freddie (Tom Burke) to the suave and more typically Bond-esque Stokes (Regé-Jean Page of Bridgerton fame), who together with his partner, the agency's psychiatrist Dr Vaughan (Naomie Harris), the quartet rounded by communications specialist, Clarissa (Marisa Abela). Much of the first act of the film is Soderbergh and script writer, David Koepp (most recently penning Jurassic World: Rebirth and the lopsided Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) fleshing out the film's five suspects.

Starting with the first of the film's two dining table scenes, as layers are peeled back from each, so we get to know both the quartet, including their infidelities, their foibles and vices, as what appears to be a simple after-dinner game spirals into incriminating evidence and explosions of violence. This, and its counterpart are by far the best scenes in the film, where Fassbender and Blanchett are in their element as the faithfully married couple who seem to hold all the cards, where their chemistry is at its strongest, and where the style of them and their home, over which Soderbergh's camera glides during these scenes, and the sophistication of their tastes most ably plays against the younger members of the group. They are also the best shot, best edited, and most interesting scenes of the film, a taut cat and mouse game played out not in the offices and field of other spy thrillers like Tomas Alfredson's stark and brilliant Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), but across a dining table.

Spy x Spy: Fassbender's George and Blanchett's Kathryn make for a likable if formidable power couple

If Black Bag does have a flaw, it's in the film between these two smartly shot and written setpieces that bookend the film. The spy vs. spy drama is well-done, but there are moments where it feels too close to typical work in this genre, especially once Kathryn heads out on a mission that deepens suspicions that she may be the mole. The scenes within the unnamed agency flick between building scenes between the Woodhouses' suspects, their deepening realisation that they themselves have become embroiled in a Le Carré-esque conspiracy, and the typical meeting and computer surveillance scenes typical of this fare in which Pierce Brosnan's lightweight head of the Agency, Stieglitz, features. 

There are also occasionally jarring moments where the otherwise curiously timeless endless game of spy vs. spy rudely reminds us, through its only occasionally seen foreign actor, Kulikov, who has been leaked the film's MacGuffin, Severus, that this is 2025, a world of drone strikes and war in Eastern Europe. The scenes outside the Woodhouse home (and by extension some nicely shot sequences on a lake as George fishes) are by no means poor: there's an enjoyable tension to a scene in which George surveils his wife's mission in Eastern Europe against the clock, and the film's tight running time gives the entire piece a heft that would be missing from a longer picture. If Black Bag has any failing, it is that it starts so strongly, and in a way that works perfectly to both Soderbergh's style and its mid-budget nature that the middle of the film struggles to maintain this high quality in places.

Yet, as Soderbergh himself states, there is a note of worry alongside the frustration at Black Bag's underperformance and swift exit to VoD, a worry that the mid budget theatrical movie has, or will soon, become a thing of the past. Black Bag is a perfect example of why these films are important, a slickly shot, engaging film that uses its style and cast to tell a story on a smaller, but no less dramatic scale

Rating: Highly Recommended
 
Black Bag is available via BluRay and DVD from Warner Bros, and streaming from NowTV

Next week, to the quixotic attempts by two actors to stage Hamlet, during the pandemic, in Grand Theft Auto Online, as we continue our look back at 2025 with Grand Theft Hamlet.