Black Bag 2025
Welcome, George and Kathryn. Thanks to you two, I am seeking lifeblood once again in the thriller film genre. I am thrilling on thrillers again. I have just met you in the tense offices and back-alley meetings of Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag. The ads before the film shouted, “Bombs! Catastrophes! Disasters!” You guys and your movie, though, are crying out, “Characters! People! Flesh and blood!”
As we know, thrillers are not often humane and hospitable places for characters that have the blood of life in them. They are too frequently the world of zombies and puppets. Too many times to count, I have put thrillers far, far down on my to-see list because I feared those zombies and puppets.
George and Kathryn, I admit you guys are dolled up and you look suspiciously like movie stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. I also admit you sometimes do stuff because the screenwriter and the story told you to do it. Along with that, I haven’t forgotten that you are spies married to each other which is kind of a fakey thing that movies do. Yet there is something about you.
You are sorta, kinda real. As a married couple, you sit together at the table, you go to bed together, and you decide how much of the truth to tell one another. We keep watching because we wonder what you mean to each other. What you are to each other. How you will love each other. Will you actually come to hate or betray each other?
George, you begin by being told Kathryn is one of the five suspects in the leak of a secret program called Severus. (The fact you are told this in the very first scene is what allows your film to be so lean and mean and so propulsive from its first moments.) You and Kathryn then have all the other four suspects over for dinner. George, you drug all your dinner guests to get them to spill secrets. What do we make of this, though, that you make your wife an exception and warn her not to touch the Chana Masala? As the film goes forward, you, Kathryn, and the other four suspects watch each other. You also watch each other watching each other. Is Kathryn different for you than the other four? As you say at one point about Kathryn, “I watch her, and I assume she watches me.”
We may not care so much what happens to the Severus MacGuffin in your story, but we care about you guys. We care about how you will begin and how you will end. We care about whether you will survive each other. We care about how much you really love each other. We will also still remember you two even months or years after we have forgotten what Severus was or why it mattered.
Because of that, George and Kathryn, you make this movie watchable. Better, you make it rewatchable. Best, you mess up the seams in this smooth movieish movie and make them bleed. Yes, let our thrillers bleed. Let all our movies bleed.
