“I can feel when you’re watching me,” says Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) to her husband, George (Michael Fassbender), early on in Black Bag. “I like it.” Akin to their first — January’s Presence, a haunted-house movie shot from a lonely ghost’s perspective — writer David Koepp and director Steven Soderbergh’s second collaboration of the year unfurls from the vantage of someone with an unusually piercing gaze. George is a British spy who, at the beginning of the movie, is assigned by his supervisor (Gustaf Skarsgård) to pare down, out of a group of five co-workers, who leaked a top-secret software program that could be parlayed for nuclear warfare. 

Among the suspects is Kathryn, a fellow intelligence officer who mischievously admits to being unopposed to lying to her husband when necessary and who can’t be certain he won’t dull his investigative ruthlessness around her: Black Bag briefly alludes to George’s unhesitant dismantling of his fellow-agent father’s personal and professional standing in one fell swoop not that long ago. Romantic entanglements in this possibly traitorous group don’t end with this committedly monogamous couple: Satellite-imagery analyst Clarissa (Marisa Abela) is having an emotionally bumpy affair with Freddie (Tom Burke), a smarmy underling of George’s still fuming over a missed promotion, and the intelligence firm’s resident psychiatrist, Zoe (Naomie Harris), has been sleeping on the down low with James (Regé-Jean Page), a cocky young colonel.  

Read the full review at South Sound.