Black Bag opens with an absolutely gorgeous, minutes-long oner, setting the tone and feel for the film in a bit of technical brilliance. Following Michal Fassbender’s George, we stare at the back of his head as he walks through alleyways and streets, down into a busy nightclub and back up onto the street for a (semi) clandestine meeting with an informant.
The purpose of the oner is two-fold. First, it establishes George’s tenacity and inability to be distracted when on mission. He is unwavering and a bloodhound, and once he’s caught a scent, he’ll follow it to the ends of the earth.
Second, the oner serves as a miniaturised and compressed version of Black Bag. The various high and lows, the noise, the quiet and the mystery of what unfolds during the opening sequence can all be mirrored and matched with beats in the plot. It’s a clever and perfect way to engage the audience and set them up for what comes next.
Black Bag Review
And what does come next is a delicious spy dramedy focusing not on explosions, gadgets or fistfights and instead on the people. The spies themselves, who they are, what they believe in and what they’ll do in the right (or wrong) circumstances. The overarching plot involves a mystery MacGuffin named Severus, which has been stolen and the hunt for it and its thief before it can be used to melt down a nuclear reactor in Russia.
All of this is window dressing nonsense for the real stuff in Black Bag; characters talking cryptically, deceiving one another and verbally sparring. Fassbender’s George is married to another agent, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), who has been flagged as one of five agents who could have stolen Severus. George, known as the agency’s human lie detector, sets out to discover the truth at all costs and begins by inviting the suspects to dinner and dosing them with a potent truth serum.
This first dinner scene (mirrored wonderfully at the film’s denouement) is a tour de force for the actors and Director Steven Soderbergh. What begins as a casual dinner with lively conversation and debate, gradually descends into madness and chaos as the truth serum takes hold. George takes the opportunity to prod and poke, peeling back layers, revealing secrets and seeing what bubbles to the surface.
The main cast makes great use of this opening dinner scene and every actor is flawless. Black Bag is undeniably Fassbender and Blanchett’s show, but Marisa Abela as Clarissa Dubose, Tom Burke as Freddie Smalls, Naomie Harris as Dr. Zoe Vaughan and Regé-Jean Page as Col. James Stokes hold their own in this heavyweight room. Burke and Dubose, in particular, are brilliant as a couple in a deranged romance, full of seething jealousy and regret.
George and Kathryn’s marriage and devotion to one another is a core tenet of Black Bag and a cause of some derision amongst their colleagues and co-workers. Their love is seen as a weakness and their refusal to compromise on their marriage, something to be exploited. Much of Black Bag is a rumination on these two opposing ideas and whether or not love and marriage can truly conquer all. At its core, Black Bag is about loyalty and which of a swathe of competing loyalties wins over all.
Black Bag is content to take its time and slowly reveal itself without resorting to cheap tricks or flashy visuals to keep the audience engaged. The sauntering, swaggering confidence of the actors and their absolute grip on these characters is what keeps you focused. Soderbergh’s direction is, as usual, top notch with scenes stack atop one another in a way that can make the smallest moment feel the most stressful or anxiety inducing.
Many scenes feature two characters having a conversation that could otherwise be a sword fight. Thrusts, parries and eventual killing blows are landed, all with words, but the intent is clear and even though nobody is physically injured, a victory is clear every time. Black Bag uses conversation like James Bond uses his Walther PPK.
Visually, Black Bag eschews the classic shadows, darkness and noir-feel of spying and instead, takes place largely during the day, in brightly lit locations with colour and light. Soderbergh has given the film’s backgrounds a dramatic blur effect which makes Black Bag look otherworldly and ethereal; alien even. I found it quite distracting at first, given the blur heightens the brightness of the scenery and often the characters would look ringed by a glowing halo or that they had been filmed through an Instagram filter.
However, as my eyes adjusted, I realised the blurriness was akin to the opening oner. It shows George’s tenacity and his unwillingness to look anywhere but his target(s). Soderbergh wants you looking only where he has decided you should and by adding such an aggressive blur to the film, you’re forced to keep your eyes where he wants them. You feel the tunnel vision setting in while you watch and get a small sense of what George must feel every day.
Black Bag is a small scale spy thriller with big ideas and a brilliant cast. It’s tense and caustic throughout with the intrigue never letting up for a moment. Flawless acted by a group clearly having a lot of fun, Black Bag is a triumph for Soderbergh, who is no stranger to filmic success. This is the perfect movie to take your significant other to after dinner so you can argue about your loyalty on the drive home.
Leo Stevenson attended a preview screening of Black Bag as a guest of Universal Pictures Australia.
