Black Bag review: A taut and tidy spy thriller with 007 vibes ...Middle East

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With audiences increasingly drawn to series like Slow Horses, Black Doves and The Agency, which are immersed in the shadowy world of espionage where suspicion and betrayal are constant companions, director Steven Soderbergh’s stylish spy yarn will be right up their (dark) alley.

Soderbergh wastes little time with preamble as we follow dapper operative George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) into a night club, where he’s informed of a traitor at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, the place he works alongside elegant wife Kathryn (a languid Cate Blanchett).

The dilemma for George, a renowned mole hunter and walking lie detector, is that she’s one of the five listed suspects and he only has a week to catch the culprit. Shades of wartime romantic thriller Allied, in which Brad Pitt has to determine if his French Resistance wife (played by Marion Cotillard) is really a German spy.

However, George is fastidious, meticulous and seemingly unfazed by the notion his beloved could be guilty and proceeds to invite the unsuspecting other four to a dinner party at the power couple’s luxury London townhouse. As it happens, these colleagues are paired up, too, with Tom Burke’s dissolute Freddie in a relationship with young surveillance expert Clarissa (Industry star Marisa Abela), and company psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris) dating hotshot agent James (Regé-Jean Page).

The subsequent gathering is thoroughly entertaining as George spikes the meal with a truth serum, denuding his guests of their inhibitions, exposing their weaknesses and romantic deceptions, and unleashing plenty of tart interplay.

He then cajoles his guests into a table game where each person has to suggest a resolution for the individual on their right. In this moment, David Koepp’s erudite and witty script recalls the acerbic drama of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, only instead of playing “get the guest” as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (also called George) did in that 1966 Oscar winner, here George and Kathryn are out to “get the traitor”.

Indeed, words are louder than actions throughout, with George being described as “flagrantly monogamous” by the bed-hopping quartet while Zoe’s description of “an aroma of hostility wafting in” when Kathryn comes for her regular psych evaluation is delightfully caustic.

That’s in contrast to Soderbergh’s previous excursion into the spy genre, Haywire, in which Gina Carano’s kick-ass black ops agent scours the globe for her betrayer among an all-star cast that included Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas and one Michael Fassbender.

Not that an absence of action and punch-ups matters, as Fassbender — channelling another George in John Le Carre’s spymaster George Smiley from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — proves a mesmerising presence, whether it’s putting his suspects through a polygraph test or facing the possibility Kathryn may be involved with stealing a device that would cause a nuclear meltdown.

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There are some Bond vibes, not only because of the presence of former Bond Pierce Brosnan, here playing the unit’s head honcho, and Harris (Moneypenny during Daniel Craig’s tenure), but also as touted candidates for the still-vacant role of 007 in Fassbender himself and Bridgerton break-out star Page have the chance to show off their secret-agent chops.

Deft editing by Mary Ann Bernard (aka Soderbergh), a typically smooth score from regular collaborator David Holmes and cracking cast chemistry guarantees a fun and absorbing ride, and all delivered in a taut and tidy 90 minutes.

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