Black Bag (2025) review

High-ranking MI6 officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is told by his trusted colleague Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) that there is a traitor among them and provides him a list of five suspects - Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Freddie (Tom Burke), Dr. Vaughan (Naomie Harris), Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and George's wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) - so George has to try and figure out who it is, starting with inviting them to his home for dinner and then spying on all of them.  This has Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp trying to do a mashup of Dashiell Hammett (think The Thin Man without the alcoholism) and John le Carré (there is a mole at the top of the Circus) except the completed product fails to provide a reason to be invested in any of these underdeveloped characters and the "process" George undergoes to root out the villain is murky (why wait until the end to polygraph them?).  The celebration of marital trust (as opposed to promiscuity) is the kind of "moral message" one would expect from the pre-Bond era.