Steven Soderbergh fashions a thinking-fan’s spy picture about the hunt for a traitor among a group of agents that socialize together. Married agents Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are a warm couple in a ‘cool’ business, with a domestic arrangement that allows for ‘professional mistrust’ … neither can be expected to trust anyone on faith alone. David Koepp’s exacting screenplay has interesting detail and smart dialogue; the suspense prioritizes ‘who knows what’ over action gimmicks. Don’t expect anything warm & fuzzy — the show has a ‘cool’ surface, and the leading players don’t try to be lovable.

Black Bag
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray + Digital
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
2025 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date May 13, 2025 / Available from Moviezyng / 29.98
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Rege-Jean Page, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, Pierce Brosnan, Gustaf Skarsgärd, Orli Shuka.
Cinematography: Peter Andrews
Production Designer: Philip Messina
Art Directors: Adam Squires (supervising), Matt Francis, Meg Jones, Laura Mickiewicz
Costume Design: Sara Bosshard, Ellen Mirojnick
Film Editor: Mary Ann Bernard
Composer: David Holmes
Written by David Koepp
Produced by Casey Silver, Greg Jacobs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

What if someone made a good original movie and nobody came?  Today’s theatrical releases that gain traction and fill theaters tend toward highly-promoted franchise pictures and family fare (often animated), and maybe an occasional modest-budgeted horror film. A picture has to be an Event — to the extent that the presence of a name star or a name director now means little in itself. Most of America sees its new or new-ish movies streamed, in between the 5 or 6 series they follow at any given time. Nobody is at a loss for entertainment on a Saturday night. The theatrical habit only holds for events, to see a specific title.

Yet people still ask, ‘Where did “The Movies” go?’

The talented and accomplished filmmaker Steven Soderbergh is committed to the theatrical moviegoing habit. He does his own cinematography and editing under aliases; he was an enthusiastic adoptee of digital cinematography. Even if some of his pictures come off as marginal experiments, he hasn’t abandoned good storytelling or mainstream entertainment. So it was sad to see him unhappy over the lukewarm reception of his latest film Black Bag. As boosters of hard media discs, we were amused when the distributor Focus Features told him that home video would probably push his  Black Bag into the black. Well, good for Blu-rays.

One clue that Soderbergh wants to promote moviegoing comes in Black Bag itself. When its ultra-chic spy couple get out of the house to relax, they attend an evening screening, complete with popcorn.

Black Bag is a highly traditional espionage tale, smartly scripted by David Koepp. The characters are educated techno-progressives caught up in the secret business of England’s intelligence-gathering spy agency SIS (aka MI6). They move in upscale and ultra-modern settings, and pursue hobbies like gourmet cooking. Koepp and Soderbergh’s spy tale has narrative tangles and clever twists, but everything we see operates in reality. Suspense intrigue is emphasized over action. The bits of ‘things blowing up’ shown in the trailer cover most of the conventional action in the show itself. The theme is trust versus deception among professionals whose job description is to keep secrets and tell lies.

The setup is fresh and the tone is cool. Because of their work, the main players are accustomed to playing their cards close to the vest. They are conceived as interesting, but not particularly likable. That may be why Black Bag didn’t catch fire at the box office — most popular movies have somebody to warm up to.

The ultra-secret Brit intelligence agency SIS (aka MI6) is a close-knit group of professionals, each with their own adjustment to the moral issues in their work. Two top intelligence officers are the married couple George and Kathryn Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender & Cate Blanchett). They’ve impressed their colleagues with their ability to keep their marriage functioning and rise in the agency hierarchy. The problem at hand is a leak — someone in SIS is offering a secret software called Severus for sale to hostile foreign agents. Severus’ presumed use in the wrong hands would be to cause meltdowns in Russian nuclear plants, potentially harming millions. To expose the link George Woodhouse invites his closest associates to dinner and spikes their drinks with a drug that loosens tongues. A ‘tell the truth’ party game then exposes more than one awkward (but not criminal) secret, such as some clandestine sleeping around. The Woodhouse guests are two other ‘steady’ couples, managing agent Freddie (Tom Burke) and satellite surveillance tech Clarissa (Marisa Abela), plus managing agent James (Regé-Jean Page) and company psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris).

James brings George evidence that points to his own wife Kathryn as the culprit — movements of large sums of SIS money under covert identities she has used, and her travel itinerary that coincides with that of an enemy operative. George tells a confederate right out that his commitment to Kathryn is unbreakable, yet he asks James, Clarissa, Zoe and Freddie to help him investigate her, and to trust him enough not to tell anyone. Doing so is criminal activity, but the ‘Woodhouse loyalty’ among these associates is total. There are other factions in the agency that aren’t keen on the Woodhouses … including their supervisor Arthur Stiglitz (Pierce Brosnan).

Black Bag is a reasonably credible spy tale along the lines of a John Le Carre, if one swaps out the drab lifestyles and slow pace for high-end affluence and instantaneous data gathering. SIS has meeting rooms with ‘Japanese restroom’ glass walls that become opaque with the flick of a button, yet George snoops at Kathryn’s computer station by the old-school ruse of swapping ID badges. When not probing each other about relationships, the friends engage in Gourmet Ghetto small talk. Each maintains their own ‘information cocoon,’ yet they trust George implicitly. The history that has earned this trust must be really powerful. Their admiration is such that they indulge his cruel party games and his stone-faced refusal to open up emotionally. Some commit potentially career-ending acts on his say-so.

Director (and cameraman) Steven Soderbergh makes a visual feast of the cold corporate SIS headquarters. The Woodhouses’ fancy London townhouse always looks immaculate; considering their unique security needs, we wonder who they can trust to do the cleaning. Soderbergh’s direction begins on a less inspired note, with an unbroken shot that follows George out of one building, into a nightclub and out the other side to confab with a superior … the overused Goodfellas effect. The meet-up is about the need to plug that security leak. We who read too many spy and cop novels know that a company can’t probe for a security leak through normal channels. Assuming that George isn’t himself the traitor, we condone his illegal moves and disruptive behavior.

The movie does use another standard trope in a pedestrian manner … the unloaded pistol gambit. But very smart, tight scripting is the norm. Suspense is not created by withholding information, as we’re allowed to keep pace with George’s probes and machinations. The characters aren’t fully predictable corporate types. The psychiatrist Zoe and others bring up moral issues more than once. They suspect that certain SIS superiors are tainted, corrupt. They will consider ‘doing the right thing’ over following orders.

At one point George pops into Clarissa’s secure booth for satellite monitoring. The high-tech space has a wall covered by surveillance images taken from orbit, but it’s not so fanciful as to resemble a setting from James Bond movie. George asks Clarissa to do an unauthorized snoop on a particular latitude and longitude, and to do it in such a way that her superiors won’t know. It’s a criminal offense, but he sees exactly what he needs to see … no cloud cover over Zurich, I guess. As in the rest of the movie, little expository gab is needed to ‘explain’ what’s going on, a mark of good screenwriting.

Do we learn to like George Woodhouse, or just to admire him?  There’s nothing warm & fuzzy about the film’s opening dinner scene, a mini-ordeal of accusations and humiliations, finishing in a violent act we’d expect in an old Anthony Mann noir. Are George and Kathryn a modernist Nick and Nora Charles?  The symmetrical story structure has George reconvene a second dinner party, whose function is to reveal the traitor and dispense extralegal justice. The Woodhouses have no dog named Asta, but they know how to cleanly dispose of a body, no questions asked.

We gather that the title builds on the definition of a spy’s metaphorical black bag, that contains secrets. The colleagues are trained to not confide in others, yet all must function through personal relationships. Everything that one cannot share, or that is not fit for discussion (for mutual good) ‘goes in the black bag.’  If an SIS colleague hears a question he doesn’t want to answer, he just says “black bag” and they mutually agree to pretend it wasn’t asked.

As said above, we found Black Bag a smart and engaging show. It’s not nihilistic nor overly cynical, but its definition of ‘cool corporate relations’ won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. I can imagine screenwriter Koepp making use of his observations of above-the-line movie people: Hollywood players must collect information but give none out, because knowledge is power and nobody’s project / idea / job is safe. Steven Soderbergh’s slickly crafted show could well prove popular on home video and streaming.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment’s 4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray + Digital of Black Bag is a killer encoding of this presumably all-digital feature — shot on Red cameras (hope I got that right) and maintained non-film all the way. Besides a code for a digital download, the release includes a second Blu-ray disc with a standard HD feature encoding. We mention that because more 4K releases are now 4K-only; one must read the small print.

The image looks handsome on a new monitor with HDR. Soderbergh exploits the format’s wider contrast range at every opportunity. Displaying the full effect are scenes at a lakeside boathouse, where the sunlight outside is several stops brighter than the unlit interior. An older ‘docu-real’ look would expose for the dark interior and let the open doorways blast full white. A ‘studio look’ would light the interior and filter the windows and doors to even out the light levels. HDR displays a wider light spectrum, and can see detail in both dark and light areas. The doorways and windows are so bright that they almost make us wince, yet they aren’t burned out. The dark corners of the boathouse interior don’t clog into one black value.

Action scenes on a highway appear to use digital effects; we wonder if Soderbergh included these so the trailer would have some conventional action to exploit. The movie excels with much more interesting suspense moments … as when an individual asks a question with a gun at the ready, should the answerer be revealed as the traitor.

Universal includes two featurettes and a selection of deleted scenes. Steven Soderbergh bucks current trends in moviemaking in yet another notable way: duration-wise, his picture is reasonable and tidy, under a hundred minutes. It’s an appropriate length for the story it wants to tell.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Black Bag
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray + Digital rates:
Movie: Very Good – Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Featurettes:
The Company of Talent
Designing Black Bag.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra-HD and one Blu-ray disc in Keep case in card sleeve
Reviewed: June 14, 2025
(7315bag)

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