‘Black Bag’ Is a Blissfully Apolitical Spy Thriller

Loyalty tests are all the rage these days in politics. They’re also a recurring theme for director Steven Soderbergh, who’s now following up his first film of 2025, Presence, with Black Bag. The two have little in common, save for loyalty motifs. The former is a haunted house horror tale of woe; the latter a sophisticated spy thriller with low-key BDSM dynamics. 

Black Bag is kinky without the kink, and against the expectations of the brief, it’s political without politics, too. Black Bag’s title bears dual meaning: as espionage-speak for any operation necessitating “secret entry into a home or office to steal or copy materials,” and as a figurative pouch where George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) stow the secrets they’re required to keep from one another. As spies, each has secrets aplenty; as a married couple, their occupations are a daunting hurdle. After all, aren’t spouses meant to share everything?

George and Kathryn have their own way of skirting around the challenges that spycraft introduces to their relationship, which is revealed well into Black Bag’s dizzying plot. In the meantime, George satisfies his gut instinct by sniffing out a mole lurking in Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, coinciding with one bummer turn of events: Severus, a nasty cyber weapon and the film’s MacGuffin, has been stolen. Enough is said about Severus’ capabilities to impress on the audience how vital it is to recover it, lest it fall into nefarious hands. 

Ultimately, it’s the cast’s understated collective anxiety that sells the film’s stakes, and Soderbergh’s trademark casual cool that sets up its political allegory while obscuring it at the same time. Black Bag is an innately political movie, what with its tangled web of lies and backstabs, and even the occasional frontstab, not to mention the place loyalty occupies among its other considerations. Who should one put their faith in–the person they made vows to, or their country? Soderbergh and co-writer David Koepp come close to giving the game away several times throughout the film. There is a definitive answer to George and Kathryn’s quandary. Only the couple knows what it is, and getting there is an intoxicating delight. 

But Soderbergh is interested first and foremost in the steps the movie takes to get there. The “there” comes in a respectable second. Black Bag is by turns deeply nihilistic, a film about truth where the truth is hard to come by, and disarmingly hot in alternating styles: it is suggestive when suggestion suits the moment, and literal when Soderbergh leaves Blanchett and Fassbender alone in a room. “I can feel you watching me,” Kathryn murmurs to George in their first scenes together. She’s in a state of mid-dress, readying herself for a dinner party where George, the cook in his marriage, intends to discern if one of them is the mole by lacing a platter of chana masala with a narcotic that functions as a truth serum. 

This, for the record, is terrible hosting. Even Kathryn isn’t thrilled with George’s choice in seasonings. But his plan, sprung in Black Bag’s opening ten minutes, sets up the movie’s rules about power, control, submission, and truth, recurring throughout as he continues his dogged pursuit of whoever has betrayed the crown, building to a moment midway through where Kathryn’s words to George in the bedroom gain new meaning: concerned his own wife might be the culprit, he coerces Clarissa into aiming an N.C.S.C satellite at her location while she’s on assignment in Germany. Can she feel him watching her from hundreds of miles away? 

She’s in the middle of a prickly conversation with an arms dealer (played by the great Orli Shuka of Gangs of London fame). Maybe she’s too distracted to feel her husband’s heavenly gaze on her. Or maybe she does, and she doesn’t show it; after all, she’s a spy. This simmering eroticism is the stuff Black Bag is fueled by, and the best reason to go see it; “whatever, shut up, act sexy” is the ethos Soderbergh seems to have adopted for this production, where everyone dresses to the nines and stays that way (excepting, in a couple of shots, Blanchett), stirring up so much craving and desire while fully clothed to keep the audience percolating. 

You’d think a film where a veteran government spook has his allegiances thrown into competition with one another would read as an allegory regarding our current political moment. But Soderbergh is above the fray. He isn’t fussed about politics. He’d prefer to leave his viewers hot, bothered, and anxious instead of forcing them to think about the state of the nation.