Review: Steven Soderbergh’s twisty spy thriller Black Bag is filled with sex, lies and encrypted videotape

Starring Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett and Pierce Brosnan

There might be no single cinematic pleasure greater than watching beautiful people double-cross each other.

This is a truth that the director Steven Soderbergh has long universally acknowledged, having devoted a sizable portion of his ridiculously deep filmography – Haywire, The Good German, Side Effects, Out of Sight, all the Ocean’s movies – to exactly that particular sub-genre. And while Soderbergh’s latest feature, Black Bag, might not leave you gasping for air quite like his 1989 breakthrough sex, lies, and videotape – ground zero for the director’s fascination with conniving couples – watching the new spy thriller is akin to lighting up a postcoital cigarette. It is just that satisfying.

Written by Soderbergh’s new favourite collaborator David Koepp (who also penned Soderbergh’s two most recent films, Presence and Kimi), Black Bag is an espionage flick with a thankfully bloodless twist: The real violence is saved not for extraction missions or assassinations, but the cutting remarks shared between romantic partners who also happen to be high-level spooks. Think Doug Liman’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but with incisive insults replacing the semiautomatics.

At the centre of the high-stakes drama are George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), a suave London couple who both work for a branch of MI6. One night, George – something of a human lie-detector machine, who values the “truth” above all else – is informed by a colleague that there’s a turncoat in his office, with Kathryn named a potential defector. Now, George must figure out whether it’s his wife who has been playing him, or perhaps a member of two other couples who fall under suspicion: the young tech whiz Clarissa (Marisa Abela) and her older agent beau Freddie (Tom Burke), or military man James (Regé-Jean Page) and his agency-psychologist girlfriend Zoe (Naomie Harris).

Surely there is some kind of inter-office dating policy inside the real MI6, but the spy game is the perfect ground for Koepp and Soderbergh to explore themes found in any relationship: If your job is to lie, then who’s to say where the truth starts and stops inside the bedroom? George and Kathryn’s marriage is the one in which Black Bag mostly pivots around, but the searing and frequently funny performances from supporting players Burke, Abela, Page and Harris keep the film’s heart racing. And to ensure that there’s never a dull beat, Soderbergh throws in a mid-film appearance by an erstwhile 007, casting Pierce Brosnan as a righteously annoyed MI6 bigwig.

Like many of his features, Soderbergh not only directs Black Bag but also acts as the film’s cinematographer and editor, his adventurous eye savouring the more privileged corners of London with a kind of sumptuous envy. George and Kathryn’s ultramodern home is a temple of high style – complete with a kitchen, and collection of knives, to die for – but Soderbergh keeps the luxurious environs laced with a din of dread. If the marriage falls apart, so, too, does the state of the world.

Blanchett, as always, is flawless as the seductive and secretive Kathryn, but it’s Fassbender who reveals a different side of himself. Just a year or so removed from playing a fastidious and rather sympathetic assassin in David Fincher’s The Killer, the actor flips his statuesque features inward to play a rather meek and distrustful nuisance – everyone’s least favourite workplace colleague. It is a performance that feels constructed with as much attention and space for ambiguity as the film’s own just-twisty-enough story. Keep your friends close, but keep your duplicitous movie stars closer.