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Black Bag Movie Review

Black Bag is a 2025 spy thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. It’s a weakly plotted, but atmospheric and well acted movie.

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“Now I don’t mind what you two did. You saved lives.

But don’t ever fuck with my marriage again“

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When his beloved wife, Kathryn, is suspected of betraying the nation, intelligence agent George Woodhouse faces the ultimate test – loyalty to his marriage or his country. This is the second movie released in 2025 that Soderbergh directed and it’s to me weaker than his much more interesting and daring ‘Presence’. But it still has a lot going for it.

This is very much a classical film that they don’t make often these days and by that I mean that it’s all about star power and very little about the plot itself. The actors are here to elevate the middling script, which is exactly what they did. Cate Blanchett is magnetic in her role and quite memorable throughout while Michael Fassbender is just as cold and robotic as you’d come to expect from him as most of his recent roles were similar.

The two made for a very cool and fun couple. There is an obvious metaphor here about this spy work standing for relationships and the story is all about the importance of trust in any romantic relationship. Even more could have been done with this theme as the film was concerned way too much with having a brisk pace and a convoluted plot instead of further developing its themes and characters.

As for the others, Pierce Brosnan got a very small role, Tom Burke was quite memorable and Marisa Abela was a lot of fun. Naomie Harris was also excellent while Rege-Jean Page was very suave in his role. Both dinner sequences were exquisitely crafted and wildly entertaining in their playfulness and many twists and turns.

Black Bag is a polished movie that looks good and it features a terrific and very modern soundtrack. It’s this very odd mixture of contemporary and old-fashioned – the music, the pace and the themes are quite modern, but the spy elements and the overall plot are very much stuck in the 20^th century for better and for worse.

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I liked the emphasis on new tech, but the spy stuff is very difficult to believe in this century exactly due to the rise of immensely powerful technology. The movie is engaging throughout and featuring electric dialogue, but the third act was very rushed and not at all satisfactory in its eventual outcome. It needed more cooking in the oven for sure.