Black Bag review: A spy in the house of love in Steven Soderbergh’s seductive thriller

Have you ever seen Cate Blanchett slink? She can glide with certitude, lithely lean with confidence and just own a space.

It’s a marvel to behold and it is, most assuredly, seductive. She is having the best time, even just leaning across someone in the elevator to push the button.

Blanchett’s captivating physicality in Black Bag is symbolic of the film itself. The spy thriller is flirtatious and entrancing, a confident piece of work that simultaneously grips and soothes, its suspenseful pacing and playful tete-a-tetes pulling you along with an invisible hand.

Director Steven Soderbergh has form in the genre, as he does in almost every genre, but Black Bag hits the high notes of a long and prolific career. It evokes the frisky chemistry of Out of Sight, the mischief of Ocean’s Eleven and the precision of Side Effects.

For a taut thriller that clocks in at 90 minutes, Black Bag manages to do a lot. It’s both a paranoid espionage drama and a marriage story — how the two intersect is what makes it so fascinating.

What better way to mine issues about trust, blind faith and loyalty than to centre it on two married spies whose stock-in-trade is deception.

Set in London, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is a quietly intense and focused British intelligence officer whose speciality is ferreting out liars. No one has ever beaten one of his polygraphs and his razor-sharp observance means even his own philandering father couldn’t pull one over him.

George is married to Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett), the wily head of psychological operations. The two are devoted to each other and make proclamations that they would kill to protect their spouse.

The problem for George is Kathryn’s name appears on a list of five suspects who could have stolen a weapon (a piece of code, essentially) called Severus.

The other four are agents Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and James Stokes (Rege-Jean Page), data scrapper Clarissa (Marisa Abela) and in-house therapist Dr Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris). Pierce Brosnan plays Kathryn’s supercilious boss.

The covert investigation starts at George and Kathryn’s lusciously appointed London townhouse, where the six main characters play psychosexual games at the dinner table. Tip, if you’re ever invited for a meal by a spy, don’t eat their cooking, you don’t know what’s been slipped into the masala.

Between Black Bag and Apple TV+ series Disclaimer, Blanchett takes the prize for being the fictional owner of the two most chic and envy-inducing London kitchens in one year. Nancy Meyers, eat your heart out.

The production design here emphasises luxury, style and privilege. George and Kathryn’s house is all jewel tones, sleek surfaces and curated design, it screams money. As does everyone’s wardrobes, especially Kathryn’s with its autumnal colours, expensive fabrics and high boots — all the better to slither around in.

The spy game must be very lucrative. It’s all just so pleasurable. You feel ensconced in this world of tasteful opulence that is never, ever gauche.

There’s an intoxicating tension that propels the story, played out in deliberate, gratifyingly arch conversations between all the characters, elevated by Soderbergh’s masterful editing (under the pseudonym of Mary Ann Bernard, his mum’s name).

The casting here is top-notch, with every actor chosen to bring something different to the dynamic — Burke’s Freddie has a loutish vibe to offset the very held-in and slightly dangerous energy of Page’s Stokes while Abela’s Clarissa likes to bring a little chaos.

But the centrepiece is the pairing of Fassbender and Blanchett who not only make a supremely attractive couple but have this sticky dynamic that is coy, carnal and rooted in genuine devotion. We can trust them as much as they can trust each other.

There are spies in this house of love.

Rating: 4/5

Black Bag is in cinemas on March 13