Black Bag

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is the kind of spy who cooks. In the opening minutes of Black Bag he is walked through a nightclub to a quiet table, told by Philip Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) that something has gone missing from the service, handed five names, and left to notice that the fifth is his wife. He goes home and invites the other four to dinner. David Koepp’s script and Steven Soderbergh’s direction take that setup and run it for 94 minutes without a scene you could cut, and it is the neatest spy film we have seen in years. Neat is the word, and we mean it both ways.

The dinner is the film’s best half hour. Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) drinks too much and is too old for his girlfriend. Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), the youngest at the table, watches satellite feeds for a living and says whatever comes into her head. Col James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) wants a promotion, and Dr Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris), the service’s psychiatrist, is both sleeping with him and treating most of the others. George has put something in the food to help the conversation along. We laughed at what came out, and then stopped laughing, because Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) sits at the far end of the table watching her husband run an interrogation dressed up as hospitality, and never once lets him see that she knows.

Soderbergh shoots and cuts the film himself, and it looks as if it has been seen through a glass of something expensive: every lamp and monitor wears a soft halo, faces are lit from below by screens, and the London outside the windows is a grey smear. Philip Messina’s production design gives the Woodhouses a house of dark wood and low light with a kitchen you would kill in, and gives the service offices glass walls that hide nothing and reveal nothing either. Ellen Mirojnick puts Fassbender in heavy glasses and thick knitwear and Blanchett in long coats and sharp tailoring, so that she is the best-dressed person in every room and knows it. David Holmes’s score is brushed drums and walking bass, a sixties pulse that keeps the talk moving.

And it is nearly all talk. Fassbender plays George almost without moving, a man who says he would kill for his wife and means it as a compliment. Blanchett plays Kathryn larger, amused, always a beat ahead. What the film says is that two people who lie for a living can be entirely honest with each other, and the pleasure is in watching them prove it, in a boat, in a bedroom, across a desk with a colleague listening. It moved us more than a film this cool has any right to. Whatever else was going on, we believed the marriage.

The polygraph scene, in which George straps each suspect to a machine and asks questions he already knows the answers to, is the other set piece, and Abela and Burke get the best of it: she cannot stop talking, he cannot stop lying, and the needle does not care about either. Pierce Brosnan turns up in a handful of scenes as Arthur Stieglitz, the man they all answer to, and enjoys himself audibly.

Where it falls short is the mystery itself. Five suspects is not many, the film spends its second half on who moved which file and why, and Koepp’s dialogue has a habit of telling you exactly what everyone is feeling in case the actors had not. By the time the pieces are laid out on the table the game is more satisfying than it is surprising. We enjoyed every minute and, by the next morning, had mislaid most of them.

This is Soderbergh in his fast, light mode, the Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven mode, rather than his sober one, and judged as that it is among the best things he has made in a decade. Set beside Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which it plainly has in mind, it is much lighter and much less interested in the country it is set in. That is a choice, and a defensible one, but it is why the film weighs so little.

Watch it with someone you have been married to for a while. The dinner scene will play differently depending on which of you winces first.