British fake off

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This article was published 15/03/2025 (552 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cynical, sleek and very, very stylish, this new espionage film from director Steven Soderbergh and scripter David Koepp looks at a group of spies within Britain’s MI6.

What’s intriguing about this cool, calculated, expertly put-together flick is that it’s as deceptive as its characters: forget international stakes and big flashy action sequences. This is essentially a chamber piece, with guns.

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, both exuding a kind of old-school film-star glamour, play married spies George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean. Their business makes adultery easy, as one co-worker points out, but these two are known for their “flagrant monogamy.”

Soderbergh, acting as his own cinematographer (under a pseudonym, which is a pretty spy-like thing to do), opens with a tricksy extended tracking shot in a dark night club. George has an assignation with a colleague, who tells him there’s a traitor within the service. Data points have narrowed it down to five people, and — potentially testing George’s loyalty to his country or his wife — one of them is Kathryn.

George has one week to find the mole or else something called Severus — A weapon? An op? An agent? — could go haywire, potentially killing thousands of innocent people.

Taking on this assignment, George begins his high-risk, time-pressed investigation by — wait for it — holding a dinner party.

At this point, scripter Koepp (known for big movies such as Mission: Impossible and Jurassic Park and little films such as Presence) goes right into Bad Dinner Party mode. (Even better, this is the Bad British Dinner Party sub-genre, which is the best kind of Bad Dinner Party because the bitchiness is somewhat submerged.)

The guests are the suspects: young rising star James (Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page); charismatic but erratic veteran Freddie (Tom Burke of The Souvenir), who’s been passed over for promotion; newbie tech expert Clarissa (Back to Black’s Marisa Abela); and Zoe (Moonlight’s Naomie Harris), the in-house therapist who holds many of their confidences.

To make the group dynamics even more fraught, James and Zoe are in a relationship, as are Freddie and Clarissa.

After this talky sequence — with its secrets and lies and hidden tensions — we move from the low-level lighting of George and Kathryn’s impossibly gorgeous London townhouse to MI6 headquarters, a bright white labyrinth of glass and steel. Here we get more recognizably standard spy stuff, with a high-tech surveillance scene and a nicely edited extended polygraph sequence.

Positioning their clandestine service midway between the scruffy realism of the Slow Horses and the stylized escapism of 007, Soderbergh and Koepp are archly riffing on other spy movies. George’s outfits make sartorial references to Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer, while his name nods gently towards John Le Carré’s Smiley. (George’s mole hunt will also sound familiar to fans of Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.)

There are also two alumni from the Bond franchise in the cast — Harris and Pierce Brosnan, who plays a deskbound higher-up.

Despite this impeccable espionage provenance, though, Black Bag ends up feeling closer to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as it tracks the emotional fault lines of its intersecting and overlapping relationships.

The tight, taut ensemble performances are anchored by Fassbender, whose flat delivery often reads as tensely funny, and Blanchett, whose spiky, slightly hostile presence suggests her recent star turn in Tár, while her incredibly chic clothes channel mid-1970s Faye Dunaway.

As we race toward the conclusion of the film’s condensed 93-minute runtime, there is ostensibly a larger moral dilemma involving autocratic regime change, dissident movements and geopolitical conflict. But really, the whole Severus thing is a MacGuffin, as Hitchcock called the device that is necessary to move the plot along but doesn’t mean much in itself.

With Koepp’s sharp scripting and Soderbergh’s precise, distant direction, the storyline remains a vacuum-packed exercise, a game, a puzzle. There’s even a kind of Agatha Christie vibe to the final wrap-up, which is resolved not with a car chase or a firefight but — you guessed it — another dinner party.

When this dangerous get-together is over, the film does feel like less than the sum of its parts. Still, while it’s unfolding, Black Bag is elegantly, effortlessly entertaining.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca