Too impossibly cool
dir: Steven Soderbergh
2025
Soderbergh delivers another consistently solid flick. He’s delivered so many of them. He’s like the Stephen King of movies. Most of them aren’t masterpieces by any stretch, but they’re better than merely passable, way better than average, and really well put together.
This is another competent genre exercise, but it’s not as prosaic as I’m making it sound. It’s ruthlessly mechanical, but there’s a quick footed charm to the whole thing. It’s the kind of flick about spies and agents that people say they prefer compared to the other ones that are filled with gratuitous violence and car chases and things blowing up.
But then the same people, upon starting to watch something like this, would invariably find it boring because of the lack of explosions, shootings and general action-y bullshit. That stuff is there for a reason. It angries up the blood and keeps you from dozing off.
The action here, for the most part, is conversational. The spy tradecraft is mostly but not exclusively of the low tech variety – of people working things out with their brains (in retrospect) and duelling not with guns or knives but with words.
And yet there’s the high tech spy shit as well, satellites and evil computer viruses and every form of surveillance possible in the panopticon wonderland that is London. It’s just that it’s not the majority of the flick.
Our main character is called George (Michael Fassbinder), and he seems like he is high up in some British spy agency. His wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) is also a senior spy in the same agency, but somehow in a different area. George hears tell that someone at his work is a traitor to King and country, but nothing more concrete beyond that it is one of five suspects, one of whom is his wife.
George prepares an exquisite meal for the 4 staff from the same agency, himself and his wife at their home, drugs them (with something to make secrets more likely to bubble to the surface), and then torments them with wordplay, sneaky revelations and psychological manipulation applied like a surgeon’s scalpel. Adventures ensue.
What emerges is a bunch of things: George seems not to trust his wife or any of the increasingly unstable people he invited to dinner, one of whom stabs the other through the hand with a steak knife.
And yet George is famous, renowned even, at work, as the Wife Guy – a guy whose devotion to Empire is second only to his devotion to his wife. He has a loathing for personal betrayal, adultery, due to family history, and yet everyone in his sights seems to be cheating on someone, anyone they can, for various reasons, psychological or otherwise.
This is a film you would enjoy only if you enjoy watching people have pointed, lacerating arguments with other people in their pursuit of a truth that may never come, but also to score points against people they previously slept with or never want to sleep with again.
George has a timeline, of a week, and the person who told him about the traitor has just coincidentally died. Who would have guessed that. The only thing notable about George’s boss is that he is played, briefly, by a Skarsgård. It doesn’t matter which one, it’s just that he’s one of a seemingly endless supply of talented Skarsgård siblings who tells himself “why should dad Stellan and Alex and Bill and Valter have all the fun?”
George suspects everyone, maybe even himself. No-one is exempt, except he’s so convinced of his wife’s overall fidelity that he only allows for the possibility that if she’s involved, it must be against her will, in that maybe she is being forced or manipulated into it. So she is a suspect too. Something doesn’t add up about her various movements around the place, and Europe. And her behaviour seems extra suspicious.
Everyone is convinced that George will notice everything, any detail in any location that he enters, so you then start to wonder whether something is the evidence that he’s looking for, or something someone has planted to lead him in a particular direction. There is the all-important clue of a movie ticket, left in a basket, that makes it look like Kathryn went and watched a movie without him. How dare she? How did she dare? What if it was an important movie that they both wanted to see together, the next instalment in the endless instalments of the Richard Linklater Before series, with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke? Maybe the next one has her burying his body once she tires of endlessly listening to his bullshit, so its title is something like Before the Cops Get Here?
But it isn’t that imagined sequel, it’s just some horror / thriller flick called Dark Windows. When he suggests that they go see a movie some night, he is trying to read whether she’s seen it, and is pretending not to have seen it, to throw him off of the scent. He notices that she doesn’t react to one of the jump scares that happens when they’re watching it, and then later, when she notices that he’s examining whether she’s reacting or not, she jumps out of her seat at the next one.
But what does that prove? Maybe nothing, maybe that she’s seen it before, knew the jump scare was coming, and thus wasn’t freaked out when it happened, because, as a spy, she’s got a pretty good memory. But she doesn’t want her husband to know she’s watched it before for whatever reason, so pretends that it all feels like the first time, feels like the very first time.
And yet that proves nothing, really, in the scheme of things. What we sense is that George is both desperate to catch her out and desperate to protect her at the same time. And when he takes steps to find out what she’s doing and where she is, steps that are, wow, not open to anyone other than people working at the highest levels of the intelligence services, and even then they’d be so tightly regulated that their off books use would be nearly impossible, it only makes him more nervous.
“I would kill for you” he tells her during what’s meant to be an intimate moment, and we know she believes it, and we know he would do it. But is that a good thing, necessarily?
One of the other agents at the dinner when the film started expresses her clear envy for their relationship, because, as she laments later on, for the rest of them, their relationships are fraught and agonising. They can only date people who are in the service, because otherwise they’d have to lie about what they do all the time to their partners, but otherwise they don’t have to be honest with their partners if all they have to say to get out of a tricky question, like, “what were you doing last Friday night?” all they have to say is “Black Bag”. Other than being the title of the flick we’re talking about, it’s the phrase they all use when they can’t or don’t want to tell their partners / lovers something, because it’s either genuinely top secret, or just the ultimate “get out of jail free” card.
“Sorry, “black bag”, can’t say anything, would have to kill you etc etc”. I’m sure there’s times it would be applicable, but you can see people abusing the privilege, because it’s just too easy.
“Why were you drinking down the pub til 2 in the morning?
- “Sorry, black bag.”
“Have you been sending dick pics to my sister?”
- “Can’t tell you, black bag.”
As such, how could you trust your partner, any partner, if they could do that to you over anything? Maybe some people can live without trust, but the rest of us mere mortals, wow, it would drive us bonkers.
It’s funny, and clever, to see how this flick and this plot fuck with the very idea of George being the devoted lunatic that he is to his wife. And then there’s the fact that, okay, we get it, you’ll do everything including treason and murder to protect your wife, but if we get it, then the other five people who were at that dinner get it too, and maybe they can figure out a way to get you to do what they want without you realising it, despite being such a super-genius? I mean, them other people are pretty sharp individuals themselves, don’t you think?
There’s the very smarmy, very cocksure Stokes (Regè-Jean Page, who only seems to play these roles), who’s from military intelligence and therefore thinks he’s better than these civvies. He gives helpful info to George about everyone else all of the time, and never seems flustered by anything.
There’s the psychiatrist on staff (Naomie Harris) who not only listens to all of the other agent’s secrets in mandated sessions, but who does not seem above fucking her co-workers and then fucking with their minds. There’s Freddie (Tom Burke), who was passed over for promotion by George to Stokes’ benefit, who drinks heavily and would fuck the furniture whether it was bolted down or not and whether anyone was watching or not, and then there’s Clarissa (Marissa Abela), who is dating Freddie in what seems like a very toxic relationship, who other than being very good at her job seems to have a perverse streak and just likes messing with people to prove that she can.
She envies what George and Kathryn have the most, and yet she acts so thirsty towards George that it’s really kinda uncomfortable. Honestly, Clarissa, respect the sanctity of their vows, plus they’re 40 years older than you.
They all put in excellent work. Marissa Abela is the clear winner in this strange yet very enjoyable film for me, seeing as she didn’t get her flowers for playing Amy Winehouse in Back to Black though in my humble opinion she really deserved them, and she won’t get them for this performance either, but she’s such a force to be reckoned with. I put the lack of support from the critics down to anti-Maltese bias. For shame, critics, for shame.
This flick rocked. I enjoyed the fuck out of it. No, I don’t think It’s a serious or realistic depiction of what it’s actually like to work for those kinds of services (in that it’s no more realistic than Spooks or Slow Horses, but it’s far more realistic than what American television / movies would have you believe with their Jack Ryan’s, your Bourne Identities or your Lionesses.
Fassbinder himself also plays a lead role in the US remake of the French series The Bureau, helpfully retitled The Agency, which is more about the toll of the spy work than the spy work itself, amidst thrilling derring-do and sweaty shenanigans, so he’s adept at playing these kinds of characters. And though here he is somewhat one note, it’s a pretty good note. This flick has minimal derring-do, the very bare minimum, but I have no problem with that. I have seen thousands of cars blow up and millions of bullets being shot, and I’ve had ample sufficiency, thanks. I have a bigger appetite for stuff that’s like this: precise people doing precise things until it all turns to custard.
And it’s a beautiful, taut 94 minutes. Does not outstay its welcome at all.
Nicely done, chaps and chappettes, nicely done.
8 ways in the end I thought the title was a euphemism for blood sausage out of 10
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“If I date someone outside the community, they don't understand, and they don't have any clearance, so I can't talk about anything. And if I date someone inside the community, I don't trust them, because they're liars, and so am I.” – succinctly put - Black Bag
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