'Black Bag' shows marriage is hard work for hot spies, too

Delicious spy thriller is one of my favorites of 2025

They say romance in the workplace is difficult, but when you’re Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett you make it work.

Marriage is work, even if you’re glamorous spies who look like Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. Maybe it’s even more work then.

Not only do you have to deal with all the ups and downs of a regular marriage, but there are certain parts of your work life you have to wall off from your partner for security reasons. Or hide in a “black bag,” in the parlance of David Koepp’s clever screenplay for Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag.”

One of the reasons that “Black Bag” lingered in my head after I saw it during its too-brief theatrical run in March was that, in addition to being such a twisty and stylish spy thriller where dinner conversations could be as cinematically exciting as shootouts and car chases, it felt like it was about something, taking the ordinary challenges of maintaining a long-term relationship and a healthy work-life balance and amping them up to entertaining extremes.

Koepp said on the Empire Spoiler Special podcast that the seeds of “Black Bag” go back 30 years, to when he was talking to CIA agents as research for his “Mission: Impossible” screenplay. What interested him was not so much the day-to-day life inside Langley, but what happened after they went home at night. How do you stay faithful and committed to your partner when your job demands that you already lie to them about what happened at the office that day?

This is how I imagine I look reading a book in public.

‘Til death do they part

In “Black Bag,” Fassbender and Blanchett are George and Mary. While their colleagues flit unsatisfyingly from affair to affair, unable to trust each other or even themselves, George and Mary are an MI6 power couple who seem to have figured it out. In his Harry Palmer glasses and turtlenecks, George cuts a meticulous figure, keeping tight control over his orderly life. Mary, with her untamed brown hair and incredibly stylish clothes, seems like more of a wild card. But they seem to make it work.

Then George is tasked with finding a traitor in the midst, he finds that Mary is one of the suspects on that list. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that the implication is that she is the traitor, and George will have to choose between his marriage and his job.

But (I think I can spoil this, since the movie’s been out for a couple of months now), the big twist is that Mary is NOT the traitor. Rather, someone else (that I won’t spoil) is playing them both, sowing distrust between the couple to further their own agenda.

What I love is that, once George and Mary both realize they’ve been patsies, it brings them closer together as they vow to find out who did it and make them pay. “I haven’t had this much fun in years,” Mary purrs, and there’s a definite charge between husband and wife as they entrap their prey. In the end, “Black Bag” is both a delicious thriller and a wickedly sincere ode to a good marriage.

In a world of secrets and lies where nobody can trust anybody, George and Mary find they can trust each other. Not only is that rather sweet, it gives them a big advantage over everybody else.

The supporting cast is outstanding, especially Tom Burke as George’s louche sidekick Freddy and Pierce Brosnan, wearing a prosthetic nose red with gin blossoms, playing older than usual as the team’s near-retirement boss. Marisa Abela really pops as a sharp-witted surveillance expert who seems to have more fun taking a lie detector test than she probably could. (The film offers some sound advice for beating a polygraph, by the way, that I won’t repeat here.)

Marisa Abela has some tips on beating a lie detector test.

Blu-ray Extras

Koepp isn’t heard from on the Blu-ray extras, and neither is Soderbergh, which is a shame. (His entertainingly testy commentary track with screenwriter Len Dobbs on “The Limey” is one of the all-time greats). Instead, there’s a couple of featurettes about the design of the film (I was floored to see that George and Mary’s sumptuous two-story apartment was a giant set and not a real location), and the usual interviews with the actors praising the other actors.

What I did find fascinating was the on-set footage of Soderbergh acting not just as director but as camera operator (he also edited the film). I knew he had a habit of doing that, but you can see how having the director literally holding the camera a few feet away, rather than ensconced in some video village, would change the relationship between actor and director. Jean Rene-Page describes him as a “scene partner,” and you can see how it would elicit more interesting, intimate performances.

There are three deleted scenes on the Blu-ray – two of them are fun but unnecessary conversations, but the third involves the death of a minor character which is not included in the final cut.

“Black Bag” and “Sinners” are currently neck-and-neck for my favorite movie of 2025 at this point. “Sinners” takes bigger swings (and only misses a couple), but rewatching “Black Bag” on Blu-ray reminded me what a clever piece of clockwork entertainment it is, with a surprising romantic heart beating underneath the machinery.