Married to the job: sexy spy thriller from Soderbergh

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett share a bed but not state secrets in the brilliant Black Bag’. Rent’s due in Keke Palmer comedy One of Them Days’. By Clarisse Loughrey

- Clarisse Loughrey

Efficiency isn’t meant to feel this thrillingly erotic. But that’s how love goes in Black Bag, an ode to a poisonously compatible marriage between spies, in which lies are the daggers slipped under a lover’s pillow each night. Airtight efficiency is also precisely how Steven Soderbergh’s thriller operates. It starts the moment its plot kicks into gear and never looks back.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) weaves through a London club. He meets his colleague, who tells him there’s a mole in the agency. One of the suspects is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). And off we go! Black Bag, like Soderbergh’s previous effort (Presence, released just over a month ago), is scripted by David Koepp. If that last film, a lo-fi POV horror, offered the most pleasurable demonstrations of craft seen so far this year, then Black Bag cranks that pleasure up several notches.

It’s lean to the bone, moving swiftly into an extended dinner party sequence built like Who’s Afraid of Vir nia Woolf? if several of its participants had committed war crimes, only to circle back to the same location later on, as if it were a prowling leopard. Insults here are exquisite little bonbons – “a perversion of what a man should be” is rebutted with “you’re a diseased creature” – and the dramatic twists are unexpected, yet never overstretched.

Everyone’s a sociopath, from Tom Burke’s lecherously cantankerous Freddie Smalls to Marisa Abela’s Clarissa Dubose, who adds to her