Black Bag review - lies, spies and unpleasant surprises

Michael Fassbender recently starred in Paramount+’s rather laborious spy drama The Agency, but here he finds himself at the centre of a much more sly and streamlined operation.

Superficially they might appear to be friends, and the film’s opening set piece finds them attending a dinner party hosted by George Woodhouse (Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn (a glamorous and regal Cate Blanchett, pictured below) at their exquisitely-styled north London home. But it isn’t a routine social occasion, since George is a mole-hunter and he’s trying to track down a security leak. If he has to garnish his expert cooking with a truth drug to encourage indiscretions from his guests, it’s merely what a conscientious professional must do.

The meal duly erupts into a fraught battlefield of accusations, confessions (though not necessarily of the right sort) and recriminations, and tells us quite a bit about our protagonists. It would seem that to succeed in the secret service, it might pay to be manipulative, promiscuous and an instinctive liar while maintaining a facade of slightly mocking amiability. The phrase “black bag” itself is code for “that’s secret and I don’t have to tell you”, a most convenient device for this crew of plotters and deceivers.

Fassbender plays the Woodhouse role with a dry, carefully-calibrated composure, and seems to stare right through people with an unyielding gaze. It’s appropriate that he’s a keen amateur fisherman, accustomed to playing a long, silent game until he can outwit his prey. He appears to be a man in complete control… until his investigations seem to point an accusatory finger at his wife. Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) is inclined to mock George for his staunch monogamy, Freddie himself being a drunk and a compulsive cheat, to the disgust of his partner Clarissa (Marisa Abela). Ironically, this may be George’s own achilles heel.

It’s rather important that George’s discreet investigations should be successful, because if they’re not, our protagonists may find that someone has handed the Russians a chunk of software code called Severus that causes meltdowns in nuclear reactors, with consequences we can only boggle at. However, while Black Bag always keeps the doomsday tension in play, it’s dealt with in a brisk and economical way, since the real interest is in the interplay of these flawed and often rather repulsive characters, who are nonetheless very good at their jobs. It might work very well as a stage play.

Koepp delivers some of his smartest writing in a scene where George is subjecting his workmates to lie-detector tests. The way they react, or ingeniously find their own countermeasures to evade the polygraph’s telltale wiggly line on the scrolling graph paper, is another index of what makes them tick in this strange looking-glass environment. The scene is also a microcosm of the film’s mix of cynicism and intellectual shrewdness – the polygraph becomes not an instrument for finding the truth, but a measure of how cleverly our protagonists can outwit it.

Another similarly telling episode is where Kathryn has to submit to a psychological assessment by the in-house shrink, Dr Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris). It’s a meeting fraught with tension, since Kathryn is contemptuous of the whole process – Dr Vaughan describes how she always knows when Kathryn is approaching because she can feel a wave of hostility surging towards her – and again the meeting is a battle of wits. Kathryn is an expert at mind-games and understands exactly how to play the Doc’s questions. Vaughan knows precisely what Kathryn is doing, but has to respect the skill with which she does it.

Director Soderbergh has put the icing on his most ingenious cake by recruiting Pierce Brosnan (pictured above with Fassbender and Tom Burke) to play the intelligence boss Arthur Stieglitz. It’s an amusing nod to Brosnan’s James Bond period (the Bond films being pretty much the exact opposite to the way intelligence and espionage are depicted here), and Brosnan plays Stieglitz as a crotchety old veteran who seems like a man out of time in this uncertain new world. Black Bag is cool, calculating, cynical and sometimes very funny, and offers a refreshingly caustic take on the clandestine, undercover world.

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