Rating: R | Runtime: 93 minutes
Release Date: March 14th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Focus Features
Director(s): Steven Soderbergh
Writer(s): David Koepp

You just have to know who to ask.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) doesn’t like liars. Just ask his father—a man he exposed and ultimately drove to suicide as a result. So, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) knows the delicate nature of what he asks him to do upon turning over a list of names with the top five suspects of having stolen a sensitive government weapon with the capability of killing thousands. Why is it so delicate? Because George’s wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) is amongst those names. She had the clearance, motive, and capacity to commit the crime. And he has the steely resolve to prove it if she did. Would he, though?

That’s the question at the core of David Koepp’s script for Black Bag. Not who did the deed or even whether its potential carnage comes true. No, the real intrigue is whether George will turn her in if she’s guilty or become the exact sort of liar he abhors to save her. What makes Steven Soderbergh’s direction of the film so entertaining, however, is that we never actually need to ask the question. Not because we know he’d kill for Kathryn or because we can assume she’d do the same for him, but because their love and trust in one another means they’d never put the other in a position where they’d need to consider the choice. The fun is therefore in the knowledge that everyone else knows this too.

Because it is their biggest weakness as covert operatives for British intelligence. They are each other’s pressure point—the one person they’d willingly compromise themselves to save. But they are also each other’s greatest asset due to that certainty. People can play their loyalty against the other for their own gain, but George and Kathryn are smart enough and confident enough to suss it out and use it to their advantage once their roads converge to reveal both of their strings have been pulled. And that doesn’t mean she’s innocent. Maybe she did steal the device. Maybe she did it to save George while he’s put on her trail to close the loop so the real perpetrator escapes scot-free. Their weakness being their strength can be their weakness yet again.

So, we have no choice but to be on high alert when considering everyone else’s role in this game. Freddie (Tom Burke) and Clarissa (Marisa Abela)—dating. Col. Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and Dr. Vaughan (Naomie Harris)—also dating. They all know this couple well enough to set this intricately devised chaos in motion and each other to maintain alibis and, perhaps, enlist accomplices. And since they all believe themselves the smartest person in the room, they possess the hubris to think playing George and Kathryn against each other might distract them long enough to get away with it. That their love could be clouded by suspicion rather than prove so ironclad that any move to out the other becomes a move to protect them and thus a tell for the fact they were the one being played the whole time.

Add Pierce Brosnan’s perpetually grumpy office leader Stieglitz and you truly cannot tell when a maneuver is meant to subvert an operation or ensure its success. Why? Because none of these people can be trusted. As Clarissa frustratingly admits at one point, someone who literally lies for a living can never be relied upon to tell the truth. So, they can’t date a civilian (it would never be real) and they can’t succeed in dating another operative (because the transactional nature of the relationship would always be undercut by the ability to hide beneath mutually accepted confidentiality). One could say it’s precisely why George and Kathryn became the perfect marks. The rest are jealous that they’ve not only made it work, but somehow made it look easy.

Therein lies the real fun for us, but especially for them. Because that relentless love means there is no line they wouldn’t cross for or with the other. To give them the room to join together and ferret out their puppet master? That’s foreplay for them. That gets them more excited than any of the tasks they are assigned because it lets them off-leash. They are no boundaries here. No bureaucratic red tape. The question of whether they would keep country above marriage becomes moot because neither would ever willingly do anything to sacrifice the former. In fact, the latter inevitably becomes the one thing they can use to save the former. And they’ll mow through anyone standing in their way.

Brosnan and Skarsgård are cameos at best, but the other six principal actors are all an absolute delight. Page and Harris are duplicitous to a fault for some great, no-holds-barred interactions in private and at George and Kathryn’s dinner table. Fassbender and Blanchett are so coldly calculating that the sexual tension of their romance can’t help screaming out whenever they’re alone (not to mention his moments of fear upon realizing he’s been used and her bloodlust for revenge upon realizing the same). My favorites, though, are Burke and Abela. They’re the messy couple. The emotional ones. They’re as unpredictable as potential villains as they are obvious leverage points. Stick each to a polygraph and enjoy the ride.

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(L to R) Cate Blanchett as Kathryn St. Jean and Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse in director Steven Soderbergh’s BLACK BAG, a Focus Features release. Credit: Claudette Barius/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.