Black Bag

Take Mr and Mrs Smith but make it serious with heaps of beautiful yellow light and a gorgeous jazz score by David Holmes. Dollop on Smiley’s People/John le Carré watchful Cold War thrillers and you have Black Bag — complete with a mole leaking away in the midst of spy-central.

Stephen’s Soderbergh’s direction, David Koepp’s writing and Peter Andrews’s cinematography create a gripping, twisty-turny spy thriller — in a domestic setting. Through it plays with light and shadows, what is being kept secret and what is about to be revealed, and how everyone seems to be involved and out to get everyone else. And I guess this is the flip side — we’re back in big global Cold War-ish politics again — and we get decent thrillers. (This has the feel of a 1970’s Michael Caine film or a sweary le Carré).

Most of all, the movie gives us the intriguing, the unseen parts of London and an age appropriate relationship with Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse and Cate Blanchett’s Kathryn St Jean. A happily married couple, they both have ‘black bag’ areas of secrets — even though, it turns out — they both work in spy-central HQ. Sometimes George brings his work home — inviting some colleagues round for dinner, with includes a truth-serum spiked dahl. Emotions, f-bombs, rivalries, insecurities, preferences and horrible pasts — and knives — begin to fly as the drug takes effect. Thankfully Kathryn has been warned off of it.

The more we get to know them, the more we see how broken they are as people — and how complex their relationships are. Regé-Jean Page’s Colonel James Stokes is involved with company psychologist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris) — until she dumps him. Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) is with the younger Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela) until George reveals that Freddie’s been cheating with a woman in a Clerkenwell Hotel.

Then there’s Pierce Brosnan’s Arthur Stieglitz, pushed into prominence as their boss Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) apparently dies of a heart attack — or perhaps a spiked drink.

No-one is quite what they seem and everyone appears to be compromised, working on something secret and hiding secrets in their work and personal black bags. George watches all of them, including his own wife — especially when he finds a cinema ticket stub in the bin for a movie she claims not to have seen yet. Meticulous about the details in everything he does, George even tests her reactions by going to see it with her. (I’m sure they’re in Regents Street Cinema for the showing!)

Utilising what he’s gleaned about everyone, the access they have to information and his expertise in administering lie detector tests, George is determined to uncover what his wife’s got herself involved in — and protectively to get her out of it. Never bogging itself down in tech, typing at computer screens or exposition, the thriller yomps on apace as George tracks his wife on her ‘business’ trip and contemplates making ‘gone finishing’ have a permanent meaning.

Some of our duplicitous Russians are missing it turns out — and George works furiously to find out who knows what. In the final analysis, if the mole is his wife. At the same time, Kathryn engages in power politics with Stieglitz and Freddie. In an Agatha Christie denouement, everyone goes back to George and Kathryn’s for dinner again. Only this time a gun and truth are on the menu, for George hates liars.

See if you can spot your new Bond among the excellent cast. And enjoy the spy jokes, such as Freddie Smalls’ ‘Q’ mug on his desk.

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