Black Bag: The Rewards of a Movie That Makes Us Think
A quietly effective spy thriller stands out in a year of loud movies
Successful movies confirm the risk and reward correlation: the more a movie requires our attention to verbal and visual subtleties and connections, the greater its potential rewards. Director and cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s (Ocean’s Eleven, Logan Lucky, Traffic, Out of Sight) March 2025 release, Black Bag, is a compact 95-minute case in point. Black Bag is a movie in a minor, but very effective, key. Here is the trailer.
Many of 2025’s movies—Superman, F1 The Movie, Sinners—present enormous visual impacts. Zombie dance numbers (Sinners) and pocket universes (Superman) abound. Absorbing the spectacular computer-generated images and special effects of these movies can feel like a workout.
Black Bag has its visual treats, but they are subtler. One fascinating visual environment is the stylish London apartment occupied by George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean who are married senior intelligence agents in England’s National Cyber Security Centre. Their exquisite home has no trace of children—its numerous reflective surfaces simultaneously mirror and obscure George and Kathryn.
The movie spans a week that George is given to identify an NCSC mole, or traitor, who threatens to unleash Severus, a devastating cyber weapon. Severus was developed, embarrassingly, by the NCSC. The list of potential suspects includes Kathryn who has her own secret mission which requires an international trip. George asks Kathryn, “Where are you off to?” She answers only, “Black bag,” and he inquires no further.
Starting from these dual opening premises, the plot does not just thicken, it rockets through numerous twists and turns. George, who is revealed to have surveilled his father, a senior agent, describes his world of deceptions and secrets and who is watching whom by saying, “Some things are best swept under the rug.”
Much of Black Bag (the term generally refers to illegal or unauthorized information gathering by stealthy means) is about what seem to be the traits of successful spies: observation, meticulous care, and making connections through deductive reasoning. Black Bag works because Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp successfully employ a wide variety of verbal and visual cues and because Fassbender and Blanchett convey volumes with subtle gestures and very few words.
Spies Watching and Being Watched
Much of Black Bag is about intelligence agents watching and being watched and how they deal with both conditions. Kathryn, in a state of partial undress, says to George: “I can feel when you are watching me…I like it.”
To find the traitor, George needs to find out where Kathryn is going. After some stealthy sleuthing at work, George determines her destination is Zurich. When they part, he wishes her “bon voyage,” but also uses the Swiss German phrase for the same term. Kathyrn barely reacts to George’s signal that he is watching her and knows where she is going.
George watches Kathryn from his vantage point as her husband, but also from space when he surreptitiously commandeers the NCSC’s satellite surveillance system. He watches Kathryn meet someone in Zurich through a brief gap, a “redirect,” when one satellite hands off its video transmissions to another one.
You Cannot Be Too Careful
Black Bag’s visual language is meticulous and evocative. Soderbergh, also the cinematographer, conceived every camera placement and every cut to reveal the complexities of the characters. Every frame is a portrait. In an early scene that is reprised at the end of the movie, George invites the treason suspects to his and Kathryn’s apartment for dinner. The camera follows George’s precise dinner preparations—he rapidly slices vegetables, deploys a cooking thermometer, and when tiny gravy spots appear on his shirt cuff says only, “I must change.”
Some moviegoers may find Black Bag talky, particularly in the dinner party scene and the final scene where the source of the treachery is revealed. However, concentrating on what is being said is rewarding. The dialogue is so compelling and so expertly delivered by the accomplished cast that we seem to be watching a game of multi-player high speed verbal tennis.
Trust, but Verify
The references here to Black Bag’s inventive plot are very general for spoiler avoidance purposes and out of respect for the plot’s intricate construction. The moviemakers’ skill is demonstrated when the story executes a remarkable pivot: at precisely the moment when George and Kathryn seem to have the most reason to distrust and suspect each other, they reaffirm their bond. He says, “I think I am being set up.” Kathryn responds, “I think I have been, too.”
Black Bag, then, is spy thriller, workplace drama, and a romantic exploration of how to make a marriage work in very difficult circumstances. George (“I value loyalty”) and Kathryn (“Would you kill for me, George?”) profess their devotion not by expressing what they think of each other, but rather by affirming what they will do for each other when the chips are down.
When an NCSC colleague asks George how a marriage, supposedly built on trust, can work when it involves two spies who lead lives of deception, he answers, “I watch her, I assume she watches me. If she's in trouble, even of her own making, I will do everything in my power to extricate her.”
The Uses and Misuses of Violence
The previews that run before almost every movie, which are increasingly becoming a chore to watch, confirm that we are in an era of extensive cinematic violence. Black Bag generates tension and suspense without relying on excessive violence. The movie’s limited violence involves one scene of precise and remotely controlled destruction while the other is extremely personal. Both are very effective.
The Tyranny of the Box Office
Black Bag is no blockbuster. The movie seems destined to make back its production costs, and possibly a modest profit, but nothing like the astronomical financial returns aimed for by movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and by other franchises, for example, the Jurassic World and Mission Impossible series. In April, Soderbergh gave interviews describing Black Bag’s modest opening box office figures and positive critical reception as “frustrating.”
Let’s See Movies in Theaters
This brief appreciation is to encourage you to see Black Bag. It is available on streaming platforms, which are admittedly convenient. Even so, some movies, and Black Bag is one, deserve to be experienced in theaters where they were intended to be seen.
I was fortunate to take film courses more than 50 years ago with Wesleyan University’s distinguished scholar Jeanine Basinger, and to have seen her periodically since then. Jeanine strongly believes that movies are meant to be seen in theaters. You can see descriptions of Jeanine’s magisterial and comprehensive writing about movies
I once asked Jeanine which five or so movies she would select to be marooned with on a desert island. Before identifying a few favorite films Jeanine said, “Mark, you know I would only agree to be marooned on a desert island that had a modern theater.”
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