Steven Soderbergh works wonders in London

It can be hard to keep up with the films of Steven Soderbergh. Since declaring a laughably short-lived ‘retirement’ in 2013, the director has kept up a work rate that puts his peers to shame – and there are few film-makers who can work as economically as he can. Here is a director who is often his own cinematographer and editor, and who has made an entire film on an iPhone (more accurately, three iPhone 7s). It comes only two months after the release of his haunted-house thriller, Presence, and two years after the tech-based thriller, Kimi (2022). The screenwriter on both was David Koepp and the pair have now reunited for their third film in as many years in a considerably more high-profile venture: Black Bag.

If the London-set film has attracted more attention, the presence of Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married spies must be responsible. Other characters keep up something of a meta-commentary on the casting by expressing their envy of the couple’s relationship, mixed in with envy of their ultra-bougie lifestyle. (At one point, Cate Blanchett’s character says to a guest admiring the interiors of her Georgian townhouse, ‘It’s amazing what you can afford when you don’t have children.’)

The Nova Building in Victoria, London, was the winner of the Carbuncle Cup in 2017. Photo Dukas/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

While it’s fair to say that Black Bag has more style than substance, there is one element that Londoners may find utterly surprising – much more so than anything thrown up by the plot. All our spies work for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which, in the film has its headquarters in the Nova South building in Victoria. Some readers may remember this structure as a worthy winner of the 2017 Carbuncle Cup, an annual prize awarded to the UK’s ugliest building. In their citation, the judges described it as ‘one of the worst office developments central London has ever seen’. Coming in for particular criticism were ‘the bright red prows that adorn various points of the exterior like the inflamed protruding breasts of demented preening cockerels’.

Your roving correspondent couldn’t be more astonished, then, by the fact that in his latest film, Steven Soderbergh has made Nova South look positively good. The camera even lingers on the red facades that riled the Carbuncle Cup judges so much. It’s true that the film ekes out its budget by sticking to moodily lit interiors, so a skyline – any skyline – might come as a great relief, but truly this is movie magic. From now on, developers and commercial landlords know who to call to redeem their worst mistakes.

Michael Fassbender, Tom Burke and Pierce Brosnan in Black Bag (2025), directed by Steven Soderbergh. Photo: Focus Features