2025 is shaping up to be a great year for fans of Steven Soderbergh. The Oscar winner has two new films coming next year, starting with his subversive horror flick Presence shot from the perspective of a being that haunts a family home, releasing on January 17. In March, then, the director will debut his new spy thriller Black Bag, a film that, to this point, has been kept mostly under wraps. A new trailer released today finally pulled back the curtain on the title to reveal something intimate, packed with high tension and suspicion that enraptures its main characters, played by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
Set in the U.K., Black Bag primarily follows a couple in the British intelligence community who become wrapped in a mystery involving those among their ranks. Soderbergh previously teased to The Hollywood Reporter that he and writer David Koepp developed the idea during the creation of Presence as a sort of spin on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? set in the high-stakes world of spies where international relations come into play. "So it’s a very, very specific take on people who are in the intelligence business but also have complex personal, emotional lives," he said. "It’s the kind of thing that I like a lot." At the heart of this spy story is also a strong love story that gets blurred when trust among fellow agents is fleeting.
In all, this type of twisty thriller is something Soderbergh has plenty of experience in. Most recently, he tackled the genre through Ed Solomon's starry mystery series Full Circle on Max, which strung together several seemingly unrelated characters through a kidnapping plot that uncovers their long-held secrets. Black Bag offered some unique challenges for him though. He further shared with THR that there's one long dinner sequence that was especially difficult for him to film because of how little it gave him to work with from a cinematic perspective. Still, he says it's a worthwhile scene for Koepp's writing alone and includes a climactic payoff that's well worth the wait and speaks to the complexity of the project:
"It was terrifying because there’s a 12-page dinner sequence, in which nobody even moves from their seat. And that kept me up. Because how do you do that? It’s a director’s nightmare. How do I keep this thing interesting for 12 minutes, and nobody’s moving? The good news is the scene as a piece of writing is spectacular. And what happens at the end of it, you don’t see coming. But the challenge of creating a visual scheme that evolves, as the scene is evolving, identifying where the gear shifts are, and making sure visually, where is the camera. The camera has been outside the table. Now, the camera is inside the table looking out, because of this thing that somebody said and the tenor of the room has shifted."
Who Else Is on Board for 'Black Bag'?
Black Bag brings Blanchett and Fassbender back together for the first time since Terrence Malick's Song to Song in 2017. Like that romantic drama, they'll have a starry cast around them once more, including Marisa Abela hot off her turn as Amy Winehouse in Back to Blackearlier this year. Joining her are Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and Pierce Brosnan, the latter of whom is also gearing up for Chris Columbus's star-studded Netflix movie The Thursday Murder Club next year.
Black Bag hits theaters on March 14, 2025. Check out the trailer in the player above.
Image via Focus Features
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