Black Bag: A Limp Wind

Ever been in front of a fan on hot summer day, no AC in sight? How would you describe the experience?  For my part, I’d report a mixture of gratitude and disappointment—gratitude because it’s better than nothing, disappointment because a solitary fan before a humid New Jersey summer day is like the backwash drop at the bottom of a Windex bottle squaring off against a mirror from Grey Gardens (1975). Black Bag (2025), Steven Soderbergh’s newest spy film, left me feeling much the same. To say I disliked it would be to imply it left any impression on me whatsoever. In truth, it felt like little more than a limp wind.

Soderbergh’s thriller concerns a married couple, George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). Both are spies in the British intelligence services. Both have a certain cool, affectless love for one another that parallels the film’s unrelenting elegance and style. These are secret agents who dress in fewer cummerbunds and showy dresses and more turtlenecks-blazer combos and sleek trousers. Their home, where incidentally they invite over four colleagues suspected of leaking weaponized malware to a Russian dissident general, is the height (or so I imagine; I wouldn’t know) of contemporary London sophistication. The catch (and there must be a catch) is that George has reason to believe Kathryn might be the leaker.

Is it her? If it is, will he stand up for his marriage or for his nation? Is he a Wife Guy or a Deep-State Patriot?

I won’t reveal the answer here, as there’s no fun in that. I’ll just say I was disappointed.

Black Bag commits the cardinal sin of the pure-entertainment mystery film: there’s no way to guess the solution before the end of the movie, not even a little bit. Black Bag does not, like any mystery worth its salt, just mislead and redirect. It outright refuses the viewer the pleasure of deducing, decoding, and, well, of playing secret agent. Whatever little good will it had won vaporized in that moment. What’s a mystery without getting to pretend at being a detective?

Mere jots and tittles of good will remained by that point anyway. The dialogue—much like the scenery and attire—is sleek and restrained. Imagine, if you will, witty banter not of the Marvel “did that just happen” sort but rather of an older, cooler species. These are consummate professionals who ask each other if they’re “tensing their sphincter muscles” during polygraph tests. Agents like George and Kathryn play it so straight it’s impossible to know when they’re misdirecting, what they know, and how much.

Does it work? Sure. It fits the tight focus of the movie itself (Black Bag clocks in at a mere 94 minutes). Soderbergh economizes. He directs like hit man. Everything has its place. Nothing is showy or superfluous. On reflection after watching the film, I felt a twinge of gratitude.

I confess I found Black Bag’s politics interesting too, subtle though they may be. The villain set to receive the leaked malware is a Russian dissident general planning to cause a nuclear emergency that will fracture Russia and overthrow the Putin government. The good guys in this film, in other words, are the patriotic secret agents who hate Russia—as an enemy of the UK—but who believe in the softer, cooler approach, that is, the Yankees rather than the Cowboys. That genuinely surprised me.

But that economy is a double-edged sword. Everything washed over me so quickly, so unrelentingly, all so well focused but so weak—that I left with nothing but emptiness. Even as Soderbergh’s direction impressed me, I was left without an impression of what I had just watched.

Black Bag is a non-experience. Spend an afternoon with it at the movies if you like. I doubt you’ll be bored. But within an hour, it will have vanished from your memory.