Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Black BagSteven Soderbergh’s thriller Black Bag stars Michael Fᴀssbender and Cate Blanchett as a married couple working for a spy agency, who become embroiled in multiple plots to leak cyberware to an enemy state. Fᴀssbender’s George Woodhouse and Blanchett’s Kathryn St. Jean must get to the bottom of who is behind the leak of Severus, a piece of coding created by Britain’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) that’s capable of triggering a nuclear reactor meltdown, to a Russian dissident. George and Kathryn work both separately and together on finding the culprit, among a group of colleagues at the NCSC.
George’s task is especially tough, as he’s given a list of suspects for the leak that includes Kathryn herself. The list features four other characters expertly played by Black Bag’s cast of spy-thriller specialists. Rogue Agent and COBRA’s Marisa Abela plays Clarissa Dubose, a H๏τ-headed tracking satellite operator, while The Gray Man’s Regé-Jean Page is surveillance agent Colonel James Stokes, and James Bond actor Naomi Harris is Stokes’ girlfriend and the NCSC’s in-house shrink, Dr. Zoe Vaughan. Meanwhile, Tom Burke portrays Freddie Smalls, another NCSC agent who’s in a relationship with Clarissa but sleeping with Zoe behind her back.
George Was Tricked Into Investigating Kathryn As The Possible Leak
He Found Plenty Of Evidence Pointing To His Wife As The Culprit
Black Bag is Steven Soderbergh’s most best-reviewed movie in decades on Rotten Tomatoes for a reason. For most of its 94 minutes, it uses Hitchcockian misdirection tactics to mislead its audience into thinking that it’s a story about a man tasked with convicting and ᴀssᴀssinating his wife. George is led to believe that it was Kathryn who leaked Severus, after he finds a theater ticket in their bedroom trash can, for a movie she claims never to have seen.
The ticket is marked with the coordinates for a meeting place, which turns out to be where Kathryn has a rendezvous with the right-hand man of a Russian dissident, to whom Severus has been leaked. What’s more, Stokes reports to George that a bank account involving £7 million of laundered money linked to the Severus leak is registered under a false name, which Kathryn once used as an alias, a further piece of evidence suggesting that she’s behind the leak. In fact, George is being misled into incriminating his wife, and so are we.
Kathryn Was Framed As The Leak & Investigated The Truth About Severus
Black Bag’s Prime Suspect Was Just Doing Her Job
It’s later revealed that Kathryn was simply doing her job as an NCSC by meeting one of the Russian recipients of the Severus leak, in order to investigate the plot while attempting to buy back the classified coding. Multiple conversations in Black Bag explain that what Severus could do in the wrong hands could provoke a regime change precipitating a war between the Western powers and Russia, as well as a nuclear catastrophe. Moreover, whoever leaked Severus from the NCSC was committing treason against the British state.
With Clarissa’s help, Kathryn manages to track down the location of the Russian dissidents traveling to Moscow with a copy of the code before it’s too late. She informs the US authorities, requesting that they launch a drone attack on the dissidents’ vehicle, ensuring that the Severus leak is destroyed before it can do any damage. Meanwhile, George works out that the theater ticket with coordinates on it was planted in his bedroom to frame Kathryn, and the name under which the money laundering took place wasn’t just her alias, but the alias of many agents at the NCSC.
Arthur & Stokes Were Behind The Severus Leak
The NCSC Head Wanted Regime Change In Moscow, And Used Stokes To Carry Out His Plan
The Severus leak was actually carried out by James Stokes, who’d been feeding George false information about Kathryn. It was Stokes who planted the theater ticket, and murdered George’s superior at the NCSC, to cover his own tracks and pin his treasonous act on Kathryn. Stokes wasn’t working alone, though. He was ordered to carry out the leak by Arthur Stieglitz, the NCSC head played by Pierce Brosnan, who wanted to use Severus to instigate regime change in Moscow.
Kathryn guessed that Arthur was behind the Severus leak midway through Black Bag, and was able to confirm his involvement when she told him that she’d just had the Russian dissidents killed with a US drone strike. Arthur’s horrified reaction gave away his role in the Severus leak plot, and George’s lie detector tests on Stokes, Zoe, Freddie, and Clarissa did the rest.
Clarissa Was Not Directly Involved In The Severus Leak Plots
She Has Other Reasons To Frame Kathryn And Beat A Polygraph Machine
In another sublimely suspenseful act of misdirection, Black Bag leads us to think that Clarissa Dubose may be involved in the Severus Leak plots somehow. She appears to implicate Kathryn in the plot deliberately, by failing to cover George’s tracks in time while he’s using her satellite navigation controls to spy on his wife’s meeting with the Russian dissident. In addition, George discovers that Clarissa is deliberately jamming his lie detector test using techniques designed to invalidate polygraph readings.
Clarissa Dubose wants to implicate Kathryn in treasonous acts because she’s attracted to George, and is jealous of the seemingly perfect marriage he has with Kathryn.
Yet, Clarissa has her own motives for these actions, entirely unrelated to the Severus leak plots. She wants to implicate Kathryn in treasonous acts because she’s attracted to George, and is jealous of the seemingly perfect marriage he has with Kathryn. She beats his lie detector test simply for the fun of it, as she’s trained herself to become a prodigious liar as part of her job, and so that she’s able to cheat on her boyfriend without him ever finding out.
Zoe Learned About Severus From Dating Stokes, & Then She Told Freddie
Her Personal Relationships With Patients At The NCSC Led To Word About The Leak Spreading
Clarissa isn’t even aware of the Severus leak, as it turns out. She’s actually telling the truth when she claims not to know what Severus is, during her polygraph test. She’s the only one of the suspects who doesn’t know about the leak and the plot behind it, however. Zoe knows about Severus because Stokes told her the truth about the plot one drunken evening, as he reveals at the end of their last mandatory psychiatric session. Because Zoe is having a secret affair with Freddie, she tells him Stokes’ secret during one of their meetups.
Black Bag isn’t so much interested in distracting exposition if it takes away from what’s happening. The suspense builds and builds until it combusts, and the result brings us to an immensely satisfying full-circle moment that complements the beginning. – Mae Abdulbaki – ScreenRant’s review of Black Bag
Ironically, the two suspects on George’s list who seem the most likely to have carried out the Severus leak throughout the movie are the only two who had nothing to do with it. Kathryn and Clarissa are entirely innocent. Stokes is the leaker, Zoe knows about it but doesn’t alert the NCSC as she doesn’t want to be seen breaching patient confidentiality, and Freddie also keeps the truth to himself as he wants to see George and Kathryn go down as revenge for being pᴀssed over for promotion.
Black Bag’s command of its tangled plot means that what turns out to be quite a straightforward plot keeps us guessing until the end of the movie, suspended on the edge of our seats. George and Kathryn are the perfect NCSC couple, after all, it turns out, because by keeping the full truth from each other, they never lie.
