It continues to inspire me how someone like Steven Soderbergh, who has repeatedly expressed his plans for retirement, maintains a consistent workflow and has released new films every single year since 2017.
This year alone, we have “Presence” and “Black Bag,” two entirely different films with very distant premises. The former is a ghost story told from the point of view of the apparition inside the house, while the latter is a spy thriller about finding the mole inside an intelligence agency.
By this point, I’m just starting to suspect this is just a creative hobby for Soderbergh to continue making films. These movies are produced with a decent production price tag of less than $50 million, which might be lower than today’s standards of theatrical releases.
“Black Bag” often incorporates soft glow lighting as the benchmark of its cinematography, where different sources of light beam the entire frame to elicit a mood of intrigue and posh. From a visual standpoint, it already looks more expensive than most blockbusters but also a great way to intensify the fast-paced nature of the story.
Framing the espionage narrative through the lens of a married couple in uncertainty is the greatest strength of “Black Bag”. We often place these kinds of stories through a cat-and-mouse scenario where the spy follows the long trail of the mastermind, but a hefty amount of plot points and revelations in this film are laid down via long dinner table conversations. In a thrilling scene, a gun was placed on a table not as a weapon for intimidation, but as a weapon to unearth hidden personalities and agenda.
Soderbergh was sleek to present a sense of slow seductiveness in this genre that’s often bolstered with people in constant motion. He has cast a great ensemble here, led by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a couple who suspects they hiding secrets from each other. They’re unsurprisingly charismatic and have given such rich breadth in their roles.
One of the best things about “Black Bag” is that you don’t know what to get here. The trailer has promoted it as a high-octane thriller with Cate Blanchett as a secret assassin. It’s beyond that. Its characters are intelligence agents who aren’t shaped by their missions but by their insecurities. Quite fascinating where this creative exercise leads Steven Soderbergh next.
“Black Bag” is now showing in cinemas from Universal Pictures.
Featured photos from Universal Pictures
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