A Soderbergh Double Feature: "Black Bag" and "Presence"
Saturday, April 5, 2025 at 9:00PM ;)
One third of the year over, and already Steven Soderbergh reveals himself to be one of 2025's most exciting filmmakers. In this short span of time, the Oscar-winner has released two new features, starting with the bold POV ghost story of Presence. He followed that up with an old-school spy thriller about sexy liars and the stylish world of deceit they inhabit, Black Bag. As theatrical windows continue to shorten, both pictures are already available for at-home viewing, allowing audiences worldwide to consider Soderbergh's genre experiments up close and personal.
Indeed, shall we do just that? First up, the high-class shenanigans of Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender against the world…
BLACK BAG
For a mainstream American filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh is awfully fond of experimenting. He's not exactlya partaker of experimental cinema but a good amount of his output comes to life in the form of exercises, little attempts at trying something new or test the limits of convention, finagle with standards and agreed-upon models, form, function. Unlike most of those who practice their art in underground circles and other rarefied milieus, his subject springs forth from popular commercial fare. The movie star – the person, the persona, the concept – is a favorite lab rat cum hypothesis, as are the long legacies of Hollywood tradition. Recently, genre is often found at the center of Soderbergh's work.
Black Bag is a prime example, emerging as a sort of thought experiment on mix and matching various types of mystery and spy thriller hits from the last century. We start with a couple of spies – Kathryn and George – who themselves embody specific sorts of these fictions, celluloid and pulp fantasies alike. He is akin to an echo of le Carré's George Smiley, played in a minor key by Michael Fassbender in what could probably be described as a po-faced parody of Gary Oldman's Oscar-nominated turn in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. She is a whole other affair, bringing to mind the fabulously unmotivated stylishness and sheer spectacle of 1960s glitz à la the original Thomas Crown Affair or many a Euro-trash lark.
Not that Cate Blanchett is putting on her best Faye Dunaway impression, mind you. Instead, the actress is the cat that ate the canary, all projections of glamour and self-satisfaction, a dangerous opaque that treads the needle between alluringly alien and downright alienating. Kathryn and George are not so much characters as they are genre possibilities brought together in (un)holy matrimony. And speaking of that bond, the couple's dynamic brings forth another tradition into the genre puzzle. It's The Thin Man movies and their many imitators, those slinky amuse-bouches for whom credulity and dramaturgy were secondary to the simple pleasure of watching two witty stars be hypercompetently in love.
Screenwriter David Koepp even pulls some of the plot contrivances from those delightful 30s-40s classics, including the device of dinner parties from hell as the best tool in any sleuth's arsenal. Not that these beautiful people are detectives by trade. As mentioned before, they are intelligence agents, ones enmeshed with an agency that suspects a traitor in their midst. A human lie detector, George is tasked with finding the bad apple, with everything and everyone pointing to Kathryn as the likely culprit. The story of Black Bag is thus a test of their marriage… or is it? Like in the Thin Man movies, the solidity of the leads' relationship is never in question. It's almost laughable to presume otherwise.
So, the matter isn't so much if they'll destroy each other but how Soderbergh, Koepp and company, will get them the duo their happily ever after over a pile of bodies and off-screen smoking wreckage. Dialogue scenes aren't so much conversations as they are collisions of genre permutations captured in shades of incandescent jaundice – for nighttime interiors – slate and steel – for daytime office hours. The echoes of James Bond are around, both the old and the new, along with a manifestation of the self-loathing spy dramas of the Cold War with their nebulous politics, and the thin patina of psychological inquiry covering the voracious need for a twist we've grown accustomed to in these times of prestige TV and BritBox imports.
Oh, and don't forget Agatha Christie or the non-mystery non-thriller Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which the characters joke about at one point. Not that the only quality of Black Bag is this game of spot the reference or even the intellectual curiosity of seeing how all these things fit together or, alternatively, refuse to do so. Great fun can be had with the streamlined fashion in which Soderbergh keeps moving things along, the cutting of "Mary Ann Bernard" as precise as ever, keen on the mechanics of the story over the story itself. Ellen Mirojnick hits it out of the park with the costumes, and Philip Messina delivers a London-based Architectural Digest editorial for the film's scenery. And then there's David Holmes' work, a score that's this close to pastiche before it zigs when you expected a zag.
The whole thing is a well-oiled clockwork of a movie, 93-minutes short without an ounce fat in sight or time to spare, no extraneous material to be found. It's a lean, mean machine, ruthless even, in construction just as much as in tone, though the marriage at the center of this conniving circus is never the source of any conflict per se. That can be a problem for some, but I got a kick out of it and then some. Similar to Mickey 17's central romance, Black Bag is exquisite heterosexual propaganda. The actors beyond Blanchett and Fassbender are also good, even better than the headliners, with special praise going to Marisa Abela and Tom Burke, mayhap a little round of applause for Naomie Harris who's always a delight to see on the big screen.
To be sure, delightful is the best way to describe Black Bag, a spy thriller turned Xanax-ed screwball comedy turned melodrama drained of blood that still manages to be a sterling piece of popcorn entertainment like little else out there. What can I say? I had a blast with this one.
PRESENCE
Made directly before Black Bag in Steven Soderbergh's moviemaking pipeline, Presence is almost its diametrical opposite in strategies and strengths. Their biggest similitude is the sense of genre experimentation, though there's less outright collision going on with the ghost story. In some ways, the picture is Soderbergh's stab at horror, working through the precepts of a haunting, breaking it apart into moving parts, and putting them back together in a new configuration that invalidates the adrenaline rush one usually gets from Hollywood scary movies. Presence is a haunted house tale from the perspective of the haunter. Only, the spirit is also the camera.
This notion isn't new in film history, with many an innovation equating the recording machine with an immaterial observer that could be best described as a phantasm. After all, what are phantom rides if not an understanding of the moving image as the contemplation of an entity, the screen a manifestation of that figure's watchful eye rather than a mere window or blank canvas? Even though the medium evolved, simplicity lost to time, there were still many keen to attribute character to the camera's gaze. Shooting in POV literalizes the dynamic but doesn't invent it out of thin air. It's always there. It's always been there. An old idea like a specter, persisting even when unnoticed.
In Presence, the camera is that specter narratively manifest, though not explained until the end. And, honestly, it should have remained a mystery rather than a rug pull that wants to be a gut punch but is more eye-roll-inducing than anything. But that's neither here nor there since, along with the acting, David Koepp's script is the weakest and least interesting element in Presence. The same cannot be said about Soderbergh's work as cinematographer, with this being the rare project where "Peter Andrews" is an asset. To capture the plight of a suburbanite American family newly arrived at a haunted house, the cineaste went with wide-angle lenses galore and a long-take approach to every scene.
When still, the camera produces these distorted views of domesticity, unpleasant to ponder even when the subjects are playacting at happiness – not that there's much of that here. In motion, the space gets loopier, broken in impossible curvatures that will get you dizzy when they're not getting you actively mad at the movie. It's showy and it's distracting, but it's also fascinating, especially when coupled with odd cuts to black that separate each of the one-take story fragments. The effect is distancing to the point of emotional unavailability. Or, more accurately, the feeling that you want to transcend the gimmick and reach out, commune with the characters. Form prevents you from achieving that. It holds you back and traps the film in entropy.
Yet, there's purpose to this, and not just how it erodes whatever horror there might have been left in the premise after Koepp was done writing down a familial tragedy. Consider how Zack Ryan's music bounces off these images. By far the movie's most traditional element, it's a lush wail of melancholy expressed with heavy strings and almost romantic grandeur. The broad appeal of such emotional sound smacks against visual idioms all about powerlessness to engage, redefining the experience as one concerning a deep sorrow instead of a poltergeist's rage. The final twist confirms it, but there was no need. It was already communicated through visceral terms wrapped in a clinical package.
On a first impression, Presence can be read as a deconstructing of a horror film menace. Look deeper, with a fair amount of grace, and you'll find a meditation on the passivity inherent to all cinema and the uncomfortable place it puts both audience and filmmaker. A less successful "let's try some shit" exercise than Black Bag, I can't help but be grateful that we have someone like Steven Soderbergh around. Someone equipped with vast resources and industry leeway, blessed with curiosity and willingness to experiment without a care in the world of failing his audience or some bigwig investor. If only we had more like him working today. Maybe the mainstream cinematic landscape wouldn't be quite as dire.
Both Black Bag and Presence are available for rent and purchase from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
Reader Comments (2)
I feel terrible that I haven't gotten to either of these yet for thanks for egging me on to do so with this doublefeature write up.
At age 26 Soderberg won the Palme d'Or for his debut film sex, lies, and videotape. In 2000, he won the Oscar and swept the four major critics awards (LAFCA, NBR, NYFCC, NSFC). In the 25 years since, he really hasn't made a film that is artistically provocative. I'll pass on these latest efforts.