Black Bag marks the second collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp, in the year 2025. In January, Neon released their horror drama Presence, which leaned towards the more experimental films in their respective filmographies. Focus Features’ Black Bag, out next Friday, feels like the culmination of the best this director/writer team can give us. It’s taut, thrilling and more than a little mean. It boasts a starry cast, and a script full of characters being deliciously awful to each other. And it’s easily the best work Soderbergh and Koepp have done in years.

George (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) are married British intelligence agents, and it quickly becomes clear there is a mole in the agency. George is shocked to discover that mole might be his wife. Other suspects include mismatched lovers Freddie (Tom Burke) and Clarissa (Marisa Abela), and seemingly better-matched romantic partners James (Regé-Jean Page) and staff psychologist Zoe (Naomie Harris). The story kicks off with a dinner party thrown by George and Kathryn, where the first course has been laced with a truth serum. All hell kind of breaks loose from there.

Black Bag is intricately plotted, moves along very well, and gives every player in its starry ensemble plenty of fun material to work with. Sold as a spy thriller, Black Bag is really a demented little romantic comedy about the lies we tell each other and ourselves in relationships. It’s about trust, suspicion and trickery. And it’s a stylish, sexy and sleek throwback thriller that feels like a lethal cocktail that’s equal parts Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Ocean’s Eleven, with an ounce of the trashy airport novel and a dash of the Agatha Christie mystery thrown in for good measure. It combines all these elements to feel like something wholly original, and it’s a total joy to behold.

Michael Fassbender’s character brings to mind the role he played in David Fincher’s far less effective The Killer, from a few years ago. He plays this kind of thing exceptionally well, and this time the movie is giving him the same attention to detail he’s giving it. His chemistry with the never-better Cate Blanchett is probably the centerpiece here, and the rest of these characters are pawns in the mind games they’re playing. But these people are written with such specificity and performed with such boldness, it makes every member of the ensemble compelling to follow.

And the supporting cast we have here is stacked. Regé-Jean Page, on top of the world for a hot minute as the lead star of the first Bridgerton season, has had some trouble finding good roles since leaving that show. He’s great here, and I would argue he belongs squarely in this kind of spy movie subgenre. His repartee with Naomie Harris, previously an Oscar nominee for Moonlight, is electric. And Marisa Abela, who most recently led the ill-fated Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, serves as the kind of audience conduit into this world, the only character here who speaks like a human being. And her character is definitely a highlight.

I need to take a quick moment to highlight the tech aspects here, because they were all ringing the bells of things I love. Soderbergh, under one of his usual pseudonyms, serves again as his own cinematographer. And we open on a long tracking shot following Fassbender’s character, and introducing us to this world and telling us about the rules and the stakes of it in a very slick and efficient way, and I always enjoy that. I love Philip Messina’s production design – all of these sleek, sharp offices with lots of glass and sharp edges. The house George and Kathryn live in is like the quintessential house of every movie villain and that’s where I want to live. Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes are also stunning – Fassbender looks great in all the suits and the thick rimmed glasses, and Blanchett looks like a goddess in every scene.

So, overall, I’m an easy target for what Steven Soderbergh does – he always finds interesting ways into the stories he chooses to tell and always finds a way to subvert audience expectations in ways I find endlessly fascinating. And as his riff on the spy movie, Black Bag is a deeply sharp and exciting film about the complexities of marriage and the paradoxes of truth. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are a spellbinding duo and Koepp’s script is actually giving all of its supporting cast members worthwhile material to work with. And running at a swift 90 minutes, it doesn’t waste a second of its runtime.

Black Bag would work fine at home, but I would recommend it for a night at the cinema for a few reasons. The cinematography and all of the aforementioned technical aspects are stunning and earn the canvas of the big screen. And if you choose this as a date night movie to watch with your significant other, it will leave you with lots to discuss afterward. Maybe you’ll look at the person next to you a little differently, maybe you’ll understand them on a deeper level than you did before. Only one way to find out! This one is not to be missed.