Black Bag is a sleek, stylish spy flick that could have been made in 1970, were it not for the futuristic technology on show.

The excellent new film from Steven Soderbergh follows married spies George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) as they try to uncover a plot within their mutual organisation.

Although this is a reasonably familiar framework for a movie about espionage, Black Bag is far more focused on the marriage than the mystery.

“When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?” asks one character early on, isolating Black Bag’s central premise.

That small, niggling doubt that exists in every relationship is amplified when the two halves are professional liars. How can they live together if not in complete paranoia?

We see George and Kathryn choose when to trust each other, when not to and how their mutual understanding of secrets being kept is a form of trust in itself. Their marriage is the engine of the entire film and is an excellent motivating undercurrent for the narrative, in the same way that the central mystery would be for most in the spy genre.

The mystery at the heart of Black Bag is never out of focus however, and we find out everything we need by the end.

The story never gets bogged down in needless exposition, however. Nor does it create unnecessarily high stakes to try and get you invested in the heroes’ attempts to fix the problem.

So often modern action thrillers will end in literal world domination unless our protagonist can save the day and it has become rote.

Black Bag is otherwise populated by a deep bench of great actors who play the five other major roles. There is both a former Bond in Pierce Brosnan and a former Bond girl in Naomie Harris, while Marisa Abela, Tom Burke and Regé-Jean Page are uniformly excellent.

This might not be the most ‘exciting’ movie at the cinemas, but a slick script, unshowy direction and top performances make it well worth the watch.

Rated 16 for some Language and Violence.

4/5.

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