★★★★
“When you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?” asks one of the young spies in Stephen Soderbergh’s Black Bag. It’s the question at the heart of this taut little thriller about trust and suspicion.
It’s set inside a British intelligence agency where all the staff seem to be sleeping with each other — inevitable, it’s suggested, when outsiders won’t understand your life. “Black bag” is the way the spies refer to matters they aren’t allowed to discuss even with each other, for reasons of national security. But of course it’s also an ideal way to lie to your partner.
Michael Fassbender plays George, trying to work out who has stolen a secret. He has five suspects, one of them his wife, Kate, played by Cate Blanchett. His investigation technique is to invite all five to a dinner party and lace the food with a truth drug, which certainly seems to break the ice.
Almost everyone involved is being destroyed by the opportunities to lie and betray that their day job gives them. Only George seems immune, his balance maintained with fishing expeditions. But will his devotion to her lead him astray?
It’s a quick tale, set over a single week, but all the better for it
A withdrawn British spy named George, set to hunt a mole and wondering whether he can trust his wife? The nod to our greatest spy-writer must be intentional. John le Carre’s women tended to be temptations or inspirations rather than spies in their own right. This is a more modern tale: Kate outranks her husband, who cooks dinner and tidies the house while she jets off, either to serve her country or betray it.
Bookended by dinner parties, the film is a character drama, rather than a car chase and gunfight rollercoaster. The characters are well-drawn and every performance is terrific, from Tom Burke’s dissolute philanderer to Regé-Jean Page’s ambitious climber and Marisa Abela’s pursuer of older men.
Equally enjoyable is the sight of Pierce Brosnan as the silver-haired senior man, what James Bond might have become when he realised his back was no longer up to all the shooting and shagging.
It’s a quick tale, set over a single week, but all the better for it. In an age when every story is stretched over a dozen episodes of prestige TV, before finishing on a cliff-hanger designed to set up future seasons, a 93-minute film that tells its story from beginning to end and then gets out is like a refreshing glass of water on a muggy day.
