‘Black Bag’ Review: Steven Soderbergh Turns Spy Games into Marital Therapy (HBO Max)

When it comes to spy movies or secret agent stories, we’re not really talking about a “genre” so much as a universe — a world where particular kinds of characters face particular kinds of situations. That’s why it’s hard to speak of “spy films” as if they were all the same. Some are action-packed, others comic, dramatic, heavy, or light; some more political, some less so. Black Bag combines several of these elements in a clever, curious way — though it never becomes as charming or funny as it wants to be. Beneath its dry, dark, mock-serious tone, the film mixes the density of a John le Carré plot with the setup of a farcical murder mystery — something closer to an Agatha Christie–style whodunit set in a world of spies, where everyone is sharp enough to solve the case.

That format is back in vogue thanks to hits like Knives Out, The White Lotus, or even the reality show The Traitors, though those titles tend to lean hard into comedy and excess. Steven Soderbergh goes the opposite way. His plot may be just as playfully absurd (the McGuffin is, frankly, ridiculous), but he treats it with surprising gravity — dim lights, shadowy interiors, and a protagonist named George Woodhouse, played by Michael Fassbender, who never smiles and sometimes seems more android than human. Fassbender did something similar in The Killer, and Black Bag has a bit of that David Fincher chill about it. Even more so, though, it resembles The Agency, the TV series in which he also stars.

The story unfolds inside a British intelligence agency — not MI6, but the National Cyber Security Centre. George is assigned by his boss, Meacham (Pierce Brosnan), to investigate the leak of a secret software program called Severus, allegedly to enemy hands. There are five suspects, but one of them is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). Stunned, though never visibly — he’s known as “the human polygraph” — George gathers all the suspects at his home, including his wife, who has no idea she’s being investigated. The others are two couples of fellow agents: Clarissa (Marisa Abela) and Freddie (Tom Burke), and Zoe (Naomie Harris) and James (Regé-Jean Page). Once they’re assembled, George drugs them all with a sort of truth serum.

The revelations that follow are less about matters of state than about infidelities and personal betrayals — precisely the territory that really interests Soderbergh. Black Bag may wear the costume of a spy thriller or detective mystery, but underneath it’s closer to a remarriage comedy, about a couple forced to confront the lies and secrets that could either destroy or save their long relationship. In its own way, it’s a movie about the truths and lies couples tell each other — whether about love affairs, routines, absences, or nuclear weapons programs. Everyone has their own battlefield.

George begins to suspect Kathryn’s involvement when he finds a movie ticket in the trash; later, he invites her to see that same film, and she accepts without mentioning she’s already seen it. That’s only the start of a chain of suspicions and misunderstandings involving the whole group — and their boss — where everyone doubts everyone else, in love as in espionage. Soderbergh shoots many scenes like interrogations, mostly in shadowy interiors: polygraph sessions led by George, therapy sessions with the agency psychiatrist (who happens to be Zoe), and another group meeting reminiscent of the first. These structural games from David Koepp’s script emphasize the parallel between the world of spies and the world of couples. In the end, for both George and Soderbergh, the real question isn’t whether World War III will start, but how people manage the secrets inside a marriage.

Despite the intelligence and wit of Koepp’s script — their third collaboration after Kimi and Presence — Soderbergh gives the film a tone that’s, to my taste, a little too austere for such a playful premise. It’s part of the trick he’s playing on the audience, sure, but the film at times becomes oppressively dark (it’s lit more like a horror movie), and Fassbender’s robotic performance doesn’t help much. Nobody’s asking him to go full Daniel Craig in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films, but a little charm wouldn’t hurt.

Speaking of Bonds — one past (Craig) and one who never was (Fassbender) — Black Bag also features Brosnan, Page, and “Moneypenny” herself, Naomie Harris. And while the movie plays in a space adjacent to the classic spy thriller, Soderbergh is more interested in his characters’ private lives than their professional ones. In the end, his film is trying to understand the subtle difference — and the eerie similarity — between a spy who deceives and a partner who cheats.