BLACK BAG (2025)

As someone devoted to cinema that is slow, meditative, and calculated by nature, I’ve always viewed the spy subgenre with an intrigued yet cautious eye. These films combine elements of both the action and thriller genres of the cinematic medium to weave narratives around a selective moment within a spy’s or secret agent’s life, one that is usually filled with turmoil, deceit, uncertainty, and tribulation from the sheer profundity of the plight that has been dropped onto the spy’s or agent’s doorstep, whether it spawned from a personal or occupational affair or a coalescing of both.

The subgenre has roots that reach as far back as the early 20th-century, when it took form within the literary medium with renowned works such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. It wasn’t too far from the tip that these novels, and the onset of World War I, would eventually inspire early filmmakers to devise their own espionage narratives within the medium of moving images, starting with Fritz Lang’s Spies (1928)—a film most known for the origins of many of the subgenre’s tropes, such as secret headquarters, numerical agent titles, and a beautiful, sometimes foreign, agent who falls for the protagonist due to their heroics, morality, and charm.

From Lang’s beloved work came the espionage-based works of Alfred Hitchcock, which brought further attention to the subgenre in the 1930s, with films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934); The 39 Steps (1935), the screen adaptation of Buchan’s popular espionage novel; Sabotage (1937); The Lady Vanishes (1938); and Saboteur (1942), which often focused on the lives of the innocent caught between international conspiracies or the machinations of saboteurs on the home front, like a lesser insect bound by a ravenous spider’s web.

Eventually, the spy genre would give way to the ever-popular James Bond franchise, beginning with the release of Dr. No (1962), which is often believed to be the trendsetter for what spy films preceding it were moulded after. However, some see the inception of the James Bond franchise as the inception of the subgenre’s divergence, causing it to split into two distinct styles: one of frenetic and action-packed energy dressed to the nines in computer-generated explosions and stunts, suits most moviegoers who will never be able to afford it, and women who are named after witty yet juvenile sexual puns or holidays popular within public consciousness—think of the James Bond franchise, as well as the Mission: Impossible and Jason Bourne franchises—or ones that are slow, meditative, and calculated that showcase the nature of the life of a spy/agent in a grounded manner, filled with instances that only an individual with wits as sharp as a samurai’s blade could manage.

The former style floods the market like God did to the world before warning Noah, due to its constant deliverance of bombastic visuals and sound that elicit the proper emotional responses necessary for lucrative return more frequently than the exposure to slow-building, pensive, and tensely paced grounded events, which properly reward those who take their time with it, à la samurai and Westerns; hence why I’m cautious about this subgenre, yet I’m still intrigued, as if I spot something akin to the latter I’ll go out of my way to see it, which brings us to Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, Black Bag, a contemplative return to form for both Soderbergh and the spy subgenre as a whole.

The film opens up with a behind-the-back shot of its protagonist George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender)—an intelligence agent working for the National Cyber Security Centre located in London—on his way to a nightclub, via a back alley, looking for an informant. The composition of this set piece primarily remains triangular, establishing balance within the frame, and blurs his surroundings to where they’re out of focus, yet discernible still, more than likely an indication of George’s attitude of mind, demeanour, and wit, one that is balanced and focused on his objective(s), blocking out everything else that is not a priority.

From here, we’re introduced to George’s plight: there is a traitor within the NCSC, and five of the company’s employees are being labelled as suspects, one of them being his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), and whoever they are, or they may be, have stolen a custom-made malware known as “Severus” for more than likely a nefarious machination of sorts. Black Bag doesn’t spend any time establishing its world or characters outside of their occupation; Soderbergh drops you right into the conflict and the film’s world, leaving one alone to fend for themselves and figure out its intricacies and terminology. George is cunning and sharp, making him a perfect fit for NCSC. His methods in which he gathers intelligence align with his strengths, gathering insight, content, dirt, and mud on anyone and everyone through studying body language, conversations, and where they’ve been through company-specific technology; and he uses these same means to gather the information necessary to locate the mole within the company.

George starts things out with a simple dinner with the five suspects, four through the wife’s perspective, as she doesn’t know she is being considered a suspect. This set piece is intense, in more ways than one. For starters, this scene is filled with world/company-specific terminology, and everyone talks proficiently, as though they’re all familiar with it and not vocally sandbagging themselves for a non-existent audience to catch up. It’s as authentic as a spy film set in contemporary London with the appropriate state-of-the-art occupational-specific technology can get—accents, Big Brother-like surveillance, and all.

It’s a game of telling a variety of truths, but of the person to the right of their person, and as we go down the line of party guests, who are all potentially treasonous, the viscosity of tension thickens, eventually climaxing, but just enough so George can gather new information on them. As tense as this dinner set piece gets, this is but a mere introductory sampler of what’s to come—a series of events that unfold to reveal further suspicious details coated in dense muck, a slew of red herrings, and further entangled trails of information that cause the situations they’re in to appear frustratingly nuanced for both George and the audience, which makes uncovering the traitor in NCSC rather difficult, just as a well-crafted spy film should be.

As I was watching Black Bag, I couldn’t help but feel surprised by how much I was compelled by its pacing, tension, and craft. It moves at a contemplative pace, quiet in its progression yet building tension throughout in the same manner as semi-finely ground coffee being properly brewed via a Bialetti on a gas-powered stovetop; it rises slowly yet maintains immense strength. Then, before one knows it, the film reaches a point where everything accumulated begins to burst outward from the constant building of pressure for a titillating and fulfilling cinematic apex, and in the same vein as spy films of the past that juxtaposed the style of James Bond and other spy films cut from the same cloth, making Black Bag the espionage equivalent of a samurai or western film, and, dare I say, the best Soderbergh film since his Che duology that gives off the same genteel and pertly vibe as Ocean’s Eleven (2001)? Yes. I think I will. Black Bag is Soderbergh’s best film since his Che (2008) duology that gives off the same genteel and pertly vibe as Ocean’s Eleven. It’s a return to form for Soderbergh as a filmmaker, one of sharp precision and style that is matched by its incredibly composed musical score and its well-framed cinematography.

Black Bag’s musical score, composed by David Holmes, the same film composer from films like the Ocean’s trilogy (2001-07), Haywire (2011), Logan Lucky (2017), and The Apprentice (2024), is highly compelling. Comprised of what appears to be instrumentals that are reminiscent of music that can be found within the confines of a well-established, yet trendy café, Holmes synthesizes this sound with ambient, sometimes upbeat, electronics, creating this seamless fusion of past and present musical styles to parallel the same fusion Soderbergh creates by combining older elements of spy films with contemporary ones, whilst taking place in a contemporary setting, and filmed and edited with contemporary cinematic technology. When watching Black Bag, I felt as though I was thrown right into the fray, that cold, calculated mess that is treason and uncertainty.

Then there’s Black Bag’s cinematography, which locked me into place, creating a seal above my head to entrap me within its world filled with icy deceit. Frame after frame, Soderbergh perfectly composes each scene to expel its emotional profundity through perfect evocation. No framing choice is wasted, nor mistakenly used; every choice of compositional framing is perfectly suited to complement the nature of working as an intelligence agent and the emotional and psychological instability that comes with the territory of the career, but these elements of instability have to be well-managed, or else an agent risks losing it all; George’s blade must remain sharp, so even in moments where a skilled cinematographer will use techniques to match that same emotional and psychological intensity of a film’s character(s), Soderbergh refrains from fully indulging in that practice, as to keep its framing and George’s vigor running parallel. It’s amazing how well put together this entire film is from top to bottom; well, not entirely; I can’t say the same thing about his use of lighting.

Normally, films use light to either accent a scene, enhance its mood, or, depending on the genre, define the emotional foundation of the scene or the film as a whole, enhancing storytelling. The latter you see in films with heightened dramatics (whether monochrome or coloured) and the entirety of classic film noir. When light is used properly, it’s enough to mesmerise me, locking me into place when viewing said film; however, that’s not the case for this film. The lighting in Black Bag is the only issue I have with this film, truthfully, as it’s intrusive, an eyesore that caused strain on my optics that ranged from moderate to severe. I’m not sure what Soderbergh was trying to do in this film, but I don’t think it yielded the results he was aiming for. I had a conversation with a few people who were seated around my friend and me after the film as a group — consisting of both cinephiles and casual moviegoers alike — and we all came to an agreement that Soderbergh’s use of light was utterly distracting; some proclaimed it was a bit nauseating.

To get to the point, there’s a lot of bloom. A lot! The lights in the film, whether the warmth of indoor bulbs that match the aesthetics of George’s and Kathryn’s home, the white light emanating from fluorescent lights on the ceiling of the NCSC, or the somehow sterile white light of natural sunlight (excuse me?) emanating from outside the large office windows that stretch floor to floor, are severely luminous with this added intensely blurred effect to them and the reflective light as well. They appear as big dollops of incandescence that eat up multiple sections of a shot, having the same effect the shade black would have on a viewer’s eyes when looking at a painting: locking one’s gaze in place; and when locked onto one of these great balls of Tesla’s broken dream, my eyes began to swell with tears whilst activating my nerve endings to send signals to my brain that I was experiencing pain.

As stated before, the reflective light is blurred, too, and although it doesn’t hurt like the light radiating from the light bulbs and sunlight, it does eat up any surface detail of whatever it touches, whether the surface of one’s skin or the objects that line the confines of a room, whether cabinetry/shelves or solitary items riddled within an environment. There are even times when the sunlight from outside completely engulfs the room and makes the entire setting completely blurred. When seeing this, it reminds me of what the video game company Atlus did when making Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, where they used a blurred layer on top of the models of the game to hide texture inconsistencies yet unintentionally create a stifling look to an already visually oppressive game. Maybe Soderbergh attempted to aim for the same approach: something visually oppressive to complement how suffocating it must feel for George to know that his wife may potentially be a traitor? If so, he would need to lower the bloom for it to actually be effective; that stuff hurts.

Black Bag is a pleasant surprise. I haven’t seen a lot of Soderbergh’s work, but I am aware there was a rather large lull in his career for many years before he soft-retired for a while and came back into the world of cinema, and I’m glad he did. Not only was Black Bag a riveting experience, but it’s one of his best films since his earlier era as a filmmaker that simultaneously reignited my love for the spy subgenre, as it reminded me of the films that existed pre-Bond era and the rare few that exist beyond it. I do hope that Soderbergh continues on this trajectory of making compelling and contemplative films, as the last thing we need is another era of bad films consisting of less-than-ideal Tarkovsky remakes, half-assed crime-centric thrillers living in Ocean’s Eleven’s shadow, or films with the same erotic fervour as Magic Mike (2012-15).

USA | 2025 | 94 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Steven Soderbergh.
writer: David Koepp.
starring: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page & Pierce Brosnan.