A Thriller That Knows Not to Overstay Its Welcome

Steven Soderbergh films are like buses: There’s always another one coming. This isn’t a complaint, exactly, but the director’s prolific nature is on my mind with each of his new projects—he released Presence two months ago, and he’s already got another one? How much effort could he have put into it? Black Bag, a taut spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, is an argument for the filmmaker’s ruthless efficiency. Yes, the speed with which Soderbergh has hopped from genre exercise to genre exercise of late is a little dizzying; he’s pumped out works of horror, romance, thriller, and comedy all since 2020. His skill with each, nonetheless, is hard to deny.

Black Bag, like the recent Soderbergh movies Presence and Kimi, was written by David Koepp; he’s a Hollywood stanchion who is best known for major blockbusters including Jurassic Park and Spider-Man. Now, though, Koepp is seemingly hell-bent on reviving the midsize feature that Hollywood has been missing. His latest collaboration with Soderbergh, a cat-and-mouse story about a married pair of spies, is a throwback in many ways—but its observations about the intrusive nature of espionage work on their lives feel sharply contemporary.