The most exciting film of the year so far, Steven Soderbergh’s espionage film Black Bag makes us feel like a spy and feel spied on, writes Rory Doherty.
Black Bag is a portrait of how difficult it is to date in London right now. Sure, the spy-hunting-spy intrigue consumes the entirety of the brisk 93 minute runtime, but the fact that the central married agents (played by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) become the source of envy and ire for their unhappily romanced colleagues is an unmissable driving force throughout the film, offering a tantalising and unattainable vision of long-term fulfilment in the unforgiving capital.
There’s a mole at the heart of British intelligence – a tricky piece of nuclear reactor sabotage tech called Severus has gone missing, and as George Woodhouse (Fassbender) is informed by a philandering fellow agent (Gustaf Skarsgård) outside a tacky nightclub, his wife is one of the suspects. George receives this information with a severe expression, and recommends his colleague goes home to his own wife. It’s a witty, revealing moment of deflection – I can handle my marital problems, can you say the same?
Compared to her husband, Kathryn (Blanchett) is charming, playful, and secretive, but their faith in each other’s unique field abilities unifies them. Their devotion to each other is complicated by national interests raising their head – George detests liars and has dedicated himself body and soul to uncovering secrets, which makes his relationship a massive vulnerability waiting to be exploited. As Black Bag unveils a network of romantic dysfunction and duplicity with delicious fervour, director Steven Soderbergh shows how sharp-footed and snarky the spy genre ought to be, cutting above the recent crop of London espionage dramas.
If you’ve been able to stream video content over the past year, you will have noticed that British spy thrillers are back. Forget Fleming and le Carré, shows like Slow Horses, Black Doves, The Agency (also starring Fassbender), Treason, The Day of the Jackal fill streaming platforms with different concentrations of charm, conspiracies, and subterfuge. To their credit, these shows understand why Britain has such a rich history of espionage fiction: it’s a stratified country with a history of pursuing “national interests” in conflict with the wellbeing of its unwitting citizens. If you take out the stuff about state secrets and invisible wars but keep the dreary, anonymous cityscapes, then you could easily be describing Britain from the postwar period to our current capitalist ennui – the fact that we keep seeing secret agents’ tight-lipped decorum unraveling into amorality and panic indicates something is wrong with this tense intelligence structure.
Where Black Bag differs from this recent revival is that Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp exclusively go for the jugular. Across 90 minutes, George intercepts, interrogates, and toys with his six suspects: Kathryn, intelligence therapist Dr. Vaughan (Naomie Harris), surveillance expert Clarissa (Marisa Abela), and macho agents Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and Freddie (Tom Burke) – plus their intimidating spymaster Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan). Like Zoe Kravitz in Kimi or Claire Foy in Unsane, Fassbender is exceptionally intense as Soderbergh’s put-upon lead. His mantra of exposing liars borders on hyperfixation, stemming from an Oedipal backstory of videotaping his father’s personal and treasonous indiscretions as a field agent. (Say, this Soderbergh guy knows a thing or two about sex, lies, and videotape!) Forget the Irish and American Samoan comedies, Black Bag proves that Fassbender’s break from acting (to race cars?) is in the rearview mirror, utilising his unique gravitas and fragility in a similarly compelling way to his portrayal of a burnt-out freelance assassin in The Killer.
A note on videotapes: Using cinema as a prism to interrogate human deceit is one of the film’s motifs. George takes Kathryn to the cinema and watches her gasps and laughs for clues that she’s seen it before. He submits his suspects to polygraph tests where he watches their every facial twitch from three camera feeds on a “video village” monitor. These intersections of image-making and human reactions sit alongside the spies’ reflexive use of drone attacks and surveillance AI – tools that eliminate the need for messy, arduous human involvement. It’s a cynical, inhumane contradiction that the characters never acknowledge, even if George and Kathryn’s well-honed, instinctual understanding of human behaviour is ultimately not challenged.
There’s a venom to the dialogue too – mean-spirited, suggestive lines hang in the air with piercing stares, consuming valuable oxygen as the clock runs out. Soderbergh’s recent, digitally-shot thrillers – such as Unsane, Haywire, or Kimi – may not deliver the scale and pizazz of Ocean’s Eleven, but his minimalist craft remains nimble and sophisticated. The edits are slippery and quick, jumping between canted, surveillance-like camera angles and imbue the drama with an immediate emotional edge and, by contrast, an unnatural, scrutinous remove. Soderbergh’s espionage film makes us feel like a spy and feel spied on, with an acute digital aesthetic that can be sharp and hazy when it wants.
Suffice to say, London seems horrible in Black Bag, seen mainly through high angles of side streets, rooftops, and commuter hubs that feels like one big artificially lit environment. (If you can recognize the Pret a Manger where Kathryn stages a covert intel drop, give yourself a round of applause and then seriously reconsider your life.) In interior spaces, the same tension between plush, attractive surfaces and a cool, subdermal tension lingers: our visits to modern kitchens, swish office suites, and dinners filled with blooming candlelight feel a couple steps away from being anonymous. These surfaces are seedy in their pristineness – a fitting visual design ethos for the most exciting film of the year so far. Black Bag reels you in with simmering, ill-behaved characters and tightly-wound thriller mechanics. Soderbergh delivers an espresso shot of fun to a genre threatening fatigue.
