Steven Soderbergh’s riveting new spy thriller has rekindled my love for the big screen

Until director Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag hit theaters this weekend, I hadn’t set foot in a cinema in quite a while. But if there’s one thing that’ll get me into a cushy theater seat faster than you can say “giant popcorn and a soda,” it’s a stylish, smartly written spy thriller. So there I was, and from the moment the lights dimmed and the first noirish scene unfolded — in which an impeccably dressed Michael Fassbender, wearing thick-framed glasses reminiscent of Harry Palmer, meets a tipster in a club with a secret to share — I was locked in.

Set against a backdrop of global intrigue, with a fantastic cast and a ripped-from-the-headlines story worthy of John le Carré, Black Bag is sharp, unpredictable, and keeps you guessing until the very last frame. By the time it was all over, I found myself relieved that some dumb streamer hadn’t gotten its grubby little paws all over this one. I also resolved there and then to come back to the cinema as often as I can. Eat your heart out, Netflix. 

The story here is pretty straightforward: Black Bag follows British intelligence operative George Woodhouse (Fassbender) as he’s tasked with unmasking a traitor who’s stolen a particularly nasty piece of technology. It’s a thumb drive with malware engineered to trigger a nuclear meltdown, the idea being that inserting it into a reactor in Moscow would surely topple Putin’s regime and end the war in Ukraine.

In the crosshairs of Fassbender’s mole-hunter are the spy agency’s in-house shrink Dr. Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris), junior agent Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), Woodhouse’s alcoholic colleague Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a young agency hotshot played by Regé-Jean Page, and Woodhouse’s own secret agent wife — Kathryn St. Jean, played here by Cate Blanchett with a seductive luminosity.

One would think that working as a spy runs counter to the forthright openness that a marriage requires; in the secret world, after all, lies are the coin of the realm. Even so, George is a fussy control freak who hates liars, despises them even. With a reserved competency that le Carré’s George Smiley would surely appreciate, George uses parlor games, hosted in his home, as a sort of quasi-lie detector to sniff out what’s what. The murder of a fellow agent who slipped him a scrap of paper with the names of the likeliest suspects also raises the stakes considerably.

Black Bag is smart and talky, with only sporadic action. As such, it efficiently packs a brainy spy story into its tight 93-minute runtime. The whole thing is like watching one long fuse sizzle toward its inevitably explosive conclusion.   

At its core, this is a story about contemporary espionage, of the sort conducted largely from oppressively corporate offices where computers facilitate drone strikes and close-up surveillance. There’s an intrusive nature to the job’s duplicity that also follows George and Kathryn into their glamorous, candle-lit London home, where the two of them make married life look impossibly sexy. At the same time, neither is ever fully candid with the other.

“Black bag” is a code phrase they both use to shut down a too-persistent line of questioning from the other. It’s a phrase that could mean anything from: I’m off to Harrods to buy a scarf for your birthday, to — sorry, honey, I’m catching a flight to Zurich, where I’ll be making an off-the-books deal to sell a piece of software that could finally eject Vladimir Putin from power.

Espionage, to be sure, is a game marked by grey and deceit, as opposed to ironclad certainties. Yet there’s at least one truth in the movie that reveals itself early: It’s clear that both George and Kathryn would kill to protect the other. And, thus, Black Bag’s central dilemma: Is George’s ultimate loyalty to his country or his wife? All I can say is that watching George slowly reveal the answer to that question was immensely more satisfying than watching the Netflix slop that’s kept me away from the movies for far too long.