Movie Review | Black Bag

Black Bag (Photo – Focus Features)

Sex, Lies, and Videotape was Steven Soderbergh’s breakout film in 1989, and now, from the same director, we have The Black Bag.

Black Bag
Directed by Steven Soderbergh – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Sex, lies, and no longer videotape but high surveillance and satellite technology is the tie that binds them together in a story about an unknown rogue operator in an MI5-style security firm who must be ferreted out. The “black bag” is a reference to where lies go to hide.

Michael Fassbender plays George, the agent assigned to discover who (including his wife) might be the guilty party. Soft-spoken, wearing owlish, black-framed glasses, and fond of his own gourmet-level cooking, Fassbender’s character suggest Michael Caine in his The Ipcress File days. His wife is played by Cate Blanchett.

The film, despite it stabs at suggesting international intrigue—thousands of lives at stake if a certain device is set off—is more like a dinner party drama with one of the attendees being the culprit. The six guests, all of whom seem to have high-paying, stressful jobs and interesting and intersecting sex lives and plummy British accents, spill innuendos and venom during the gatherings at the film’s beginning and end. These snarling interchanges are reminiscent of Edward Albee’s work and indeed, Fassbender’s character is named George, like the male protagonist in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The usual elements of a mystery are present, the guests with their flaws and shady allegiances, the clues, and the ticking clock (the mystery must be solved within a week). I enjoyed the interplay of the half-dozen characters under a microscope—or satellite surveillance.

Soderbergh being who he is, one expects a visual flare and I found it in the bright yet diffuse lighting, with a milky, blurring background (and sometimes foreground) that suggests that motives are “messy”—a word that recurs as the movie goes on. Perhaps best of all is the film’s 93-minute runtime, which doesn’t overstay its welcome.

In an era when cartoonish superheroes are the filmic order of the day, it’s refreshing to see that an “old fashioned” sort of movie can still be made.

Of note too is the soundtrack by David Holmes—edgy electronica that mimics the characters’ own wavering states of mind.

> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Paseo, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Santa Anita 16, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, and Regal UA La Canada.