Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Rege Jean-Page, Pierce Brosnan
Screenplay: David Koepp
94 mins. Rated R for language including some sexual references, and some violence.

Director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven) has a tendency to disappear for a few months only to emerge with several new films in his pocket. Just a few weeks ago, his ghost story Presence appeared in wide release, and now he’s back again, re-teaming with Michael Fassbender following Haywire for a new spy thriller, Black Bag, a movie that feels at times like an Agatha Christie dinner party murder mystery while enshrouded in mistrust and betrayal.

When intelligence agent George Woodhouse (Fassbender, Inglourious Basterds) is informed that a fellow agent has betrayed the nation, he’s given a list of five possible names, including his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring). Now, George has to gather enough evidence using his keen lie detection skills to know who the culprit is, and whether his loyalty lies with his spouse or his country.

Black Bag operates a bit like a play. This is a dialogue-driven whodunnit with Fassbender’s cold and calculated “detective” trying to play his suspects against each other to gain the answers. It’s at its best during the dinner party scenes when all the characters are stuck in one room together, squaring off, and I almost wish there had been more of that. Screenwriter David Koepp put in a tightly-wound script that gives the various agents ample room to breathe, and it isn’t clear at any moment who is the target, casting doubt on each of them in tow. I even started to prep for what I felt was an obvious twist that, as it turns out, was just my brain trying to make sense of the evidence I, as a viewer, had collected.

The performances are all solid, especially Fassbender and Blanchett, but I also want to highlight Marisa Abela (Barbie), who plays one of the suspects. Abela was terrific last year in the unfortunately mediocre Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, and she similarly stands out as a nervous but studious agent who aims to beat the lie detector, perhaps just so she can, and also offers a potential femme fatale to George. As with most of the characters, we’re not sure if we can or should trust her.

The only aspect where the script falls flat is with the character of Arthur Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan, Mamma Mia!). While Brosnan makes the most of the character (and seriously, he’s just terrific), I just found that his character was underwritten and underutilized for such a high-ranking official in the agency. There just isn’t anything interesting about the character outside of the performance, and yet he’s supposed to serve an important purpose in the narrative Koepp and Soderbergh have crafted.

Black Bag is one of the better mystery whodunnits in recent years. Often, recent mysteries have provided so many red herrings that there’s no possible way to have an opinion on the identity of the culprit, but Koepp’s clever screenplay and Soderbergh’s cold and clinical visual aesthetic make for an interesting, occasionally funny, and often exciting little thriller.

3.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe