Steven Soderbergh’s riveting new spy thriller has rekindled my love for the big screen

Until director Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag hit theaters this weekend, I hadn’t set foot in a cinema in quite a while. But if there’s one thing that’ll get me into a cushy theater seat faster than you can say “giant popcorn and a soda,” it’s a stylish, smartly written spy thriller. So there I was, and from the moment the lights dimmed and the first noirish scene unfolded — in which an impeccably dressed Michael Fassbender, wearing thick-framed glasses reminiscent of Harry Palmer, meets a tipster in a club with a secret to share — I was locked in.

Set against a backdrop of global intrigue, with a fantastic cast and a ripped-from-the-headlines story worthy of John le Carré, Black Bag is sharp, unpredictable, and keeps you guessing until the very last frame. By the time it was all over, I found myself relieved that some dumb streamer hadn’t gotten its grubby little paws all over this one. I also resolved there and then to come back to the cinema as often as I can. Eat your heart out, Netflix. 

The story here is pretty straightforward: Black Bag follows British intelligence operative George Woodhouse (Fassbender) as he’s tasked with unmasking a traitor who’s stolen a particularly nasty piece of technology. It’s a thumb drive with malware engineered to trigger a nuclear meltdown, the idea being that inserting it into a reactor in Moscow would surely topple Putin’s regime and end the war in Ukraine.

In the crosshairs of Fassbender’s mole-hunter are the spy agency’s in-house shrink Dr. Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris), junior agent Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), Woodhouse’s alcoholic colleague Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a young agency hotshot played by Regé-Jean Page, and Woodhouse’s own secret agent wife — Kathryn St. Jean, played here by Cate Blanchett with a seductive luminosity.

One would think that working as a spy runs counter to the forthright openness that a marriage requires; in the secret world, after all, lies are the coin of the realm. Even so, George is a fussy control freak who hates liars, despises them even. With a reserved competency that le Carré’s George Smiley would surely appreciate, George uses parlor games, hosted in his home, as a sort of quasi-lie detector to sniff out what’s what. The murder of a fellow agent who slipped him a scrap of paper with the names of the likeliest suspects also raises the stakes considerably.

Black Bag is smart and talky, with only sporadic action. As such, it efficiently packs a brainy spy story into its tight 93-minute runtime. The whole thing is like watching one long fuse sizzle toward its inevitably explosive conclusion.   

At its core, this is a story about contemporary espionage, of the sort conducted largely from oppressively corporate offices where computers facilitate drone strikes and close-up surveillance. There’s an intrusive nature to the job’s duplicity that also follows George and Kathryn into their glamorous, candle-lit London home, where the two of them make married life look impossibly sexy. At the same time, neither is ever fully candid with the other.

“Black bag” is a code phrase they both use to shut down a too-persistent line of questioning from the other. It’s a phrase that could mean anything from: I’m off to Harrods to buy a scarf for your birthday, to — sorry, honey, I’m catching a flight to Zurich, where I’ll be making an off-the-books deal to sell a piece of software that could finally eject Vladimir Putin from power.