Black Bag Review

Black Bag is the third time Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp have teamed up. This spy story is their biggest collaboration yet as they bring together an ensemble cast.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is a counterintelligence officer who identifies traitors, double agents, and leaks. He is assigned a mission to discover who stole a top-secret software program, Severus. Five suspects are involved, including his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).

Soderbergh and Koepp are no strangers to the thriller genre. Their collective filmographies include Out of Sight, Traffic, Side Effects, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and Angels & Demons. Black Bag aimed to be a more grounded, thoughtful spy film. It was closer to the works of John le Carré and Len Deighton than action franchises like James Bond and Mission: Impossible. The story and setup were like the classic spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where John le Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley, needed to find a Soviet mole in MI6. The main character’s name in Black Bag references le Carré’s most famous character.

There was a bit of another le Carré novel, A Small Town in Germany, in the film. That novel was about a counterintelligence officer who travels to Bonn when an embassy worker is suspected of defecting to the Eastern Block. Black Bag had a standard setup where a spy needed to prevent a world-threatening MacGuffin from falling into the wrong hands.

Black Bag felt like a modernisation of a le Carré story. It was a character-driven investigation story. Instead of being a Cold War story, this film focused on contemporary geopolitical issues and emphasised modern technology, like computers, satellites, and the use of AI for information gathering. Black Bag was a dialogue-driven film with George probing for information and needing to sneak around into offices. He was a cold and calculating figure who showed little emotion and had a moral code where he stated he hated liars (making his career choice a bit bizarre). Even when something goes wrong for George, he tries to keep his composure as much as possible.

Black Bag was about relationships within the spy world: the people being investigated were romantically involved in some way. George and Kathryn were married, James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris) were romantically involved, and so were Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), although the last pair had fidelity issues. Due to their profession, all these characters were isolated from the rest of society. They could only have friendships and relationships with others while trading in lies and deceit. This affected Clarissa the most, the youngest person being investigated. This meant that trust was a theme throughout the film since none of the characters trust each other.

This focus on relationships and domestic settings made Black Bag feel like the first two seconds of Spooks. Spooks was focused on young MI5 agents, and a storyline in the first two seasons involved Tom’s romances since he was in a relationship with a single mother. He said spies are meant to date other spies instead of civilians. Like the early seasons of Spooks, Black Bag aimed to be more realistic, and action was infrequent.

Black Bag was a short, taut experience. It was only 94 minutes long, and it didn’t waste any of its run time. Soderbergh is a versatile filmmaker who makes mainstream entertainment and experimental indie films. Black Bag was a more mainstream offering that could appeal to a mature audience.

For fans of spy fiction, Black Bag was a treat. It combined a typical spy story with a look at the human factor of espionage that made it a compelling thriller.