The Sexiest Spy Thriller Of The Year Just Dropped On Peacock

Spy thrillers and marriage dramas make for great bedfellows. Consider Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) or Allied (2016), or all six seasons of The Americans. When your entire line of work hinges on duplicity, can you really leave your job at the door and trust the person you share a life with?

Steven Soderbergh’s sleek Black Bag, which just hit Peacock, is as much about the carefully calibrated dynamics of marriage as it is the intricacies of spycraft, as even a date night carries the same high-stakes thrill as an assassination plot. In a profession that demands paramount secrecy, the lead couple’s surveillance of each other, borne less of suspicion than of the primal urge to protect, has never looked sexier.

Black Bag thrums with a sense of illicit pleasure from the beginning. A long tracking shot follows British intelligence agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) into a nightclub as he spots his boss in a corner, sandwiched between two blondes. This isn’t part of a cover story; Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) has cheated before, and his marriage is now in trouble. In this profession, he points out, temptation is everywhere, and it’s hard not to succumb.

But Soderbergh makes George’s domesticity — a glass of wine, a sumptuous pot roast in the oven — seem just as alluring. Black Bag turns out to be an ode to the appeal of long-term monogamy, even in (especially in) a world of fleeting thrills. For a job that weaponizes secrets and makes identities disposable, it’s electrifying to let someone know you intimately.

George and his wife, fellow agent Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), have always been faithful to each other, making their marriage the stuff of envy among their colleagues, but Meacham calls into question whether they’ve always been honest. There’s a traitor in MI6, and he tasks George with finding out which of five potential suspects it is. The catch: Kathryn’s on the list.

In one scene, George leans against a doorway and watches her dress. There’s an undercurrent of danger to the eroticism, given their profession and the fact he’s meant to be investigating her. Is this a spy observing a potential mole? Or a husband appreciating his wife’s beauty? For all their compartmentalization, professional training can’t help but spill over into personal. “I can feel when you’re watching me,” says Kathryn. “I like it.”

Compare this to a later scene where she tells an MI6 psychiatrist (Naomie Harris) of her irritation at constantly being spied on. In Black Bag, to be surveilled is a necessary evil, but to be seen is to be seduced. Later, data expert Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela) calls George “one naughty husband” as he commandeers a satellite to spy on his wife, drawing attention to the fine line between surveillance and voyeurism.

There’s no actual lovemaking in Black Bag, but there’s plenty of suggestiveness. At a dinner party with two other couples, the guests’ preferences — for erotic fiction, older men — are laid bare and become the subject of teasing. Even the idea of a polygraph test takes on a charged frisson. “When are you going to poly me, George?” asks Clarissa, her playfulness emphasizing the innuendo. Later, when George shows up at her apartment and steers the conversation towards her relationship, her immediate assumption is not that he needs her expertise, but that he wants her. Over the film, George and Kathryn’s dinner guests pair off in overlapping, unexpected combinations, professional double-crossing often inextricable from sexual betrayal.

Writer David Koepp returns to the swoony romanticism of George and Kathryn’s solid partnership time and again, in contrast to the bitter acrimony and raging volatility of their colleagues’ relationships. The two speak in their profession’s code, but make it sound like the secret language longtime couples share. They lie to each other, but they also lie for each other.

Fassbender and Blanchett exude varying degrees of cool remove, sparking heat only when they turn their intensely appraising gazes on each other. And yet each assignment is also a test of their marriage. George hates the distance when Kathryn has to travel for work, but he’s quick to bridge any emotional chasm between them. In one scene, he pretends to be asleep as his wife slips into bed, a shot that would evoke a marriage in crisis in any other movie. Here, however, he soon rolls over, they talk, and they emerge all the stronger for it.

In Black Bag, governments teeter on the brink of collapse and countries can be destabilized at a moment’s notice, but these routine spy thriller events are eclipsed by the heft of George and Kathryn’s all-encompassing bond. Their passion for each other? That’s unshakeable.

Black Bag is streaming on Peacock.