What would you do if your significant other was accused of treason? Does true loyalty lie with love or country? It’s a question that permeates like a bullet in a chamber, constantly revolving around Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag—his best film in over a decade—until the trigger is mercilessly pulled. Many such tough questions, and even tougher answers, coldly slink their way through the subterfuge to unearth what is, oddly, one of the most intensely romantic films of the year so far.

Michael Fassbender stars as the esteemed George Woodhouse, a high-ranking intelligence operative. He works for the National Cyber Security Center, a tech-focused, MI-adjacent organization that contains a mole attempting to obtain a malware device dubbed “Severus,” capable of causing nuclear meltdowns. After a hypnotically staged oner that takes us from cobbled streets to the thumping belly of a London bar, George is given a list of five key suspects who may be acting as double agents.

The real wrinkle develops when one of them turns out to be his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), an operative who works at the same agency and with whom he shares a venerable and ardent married life. The possibility of such treachery calls their blissful status quo into question, and whether there are other, deeper secrets she keeps stuffed in the proverbial black bag.

From here, Soderbergh’s exercise in espionage unfolds as an acerbic, darkly comic cross between Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the cat-and-mouse works of John le Carré and Agatha Christie. His third collaboration in as many years with screenwriter David Koepp crackles with barbed wit and sophisticated bite.

Each dinner table conversation with fellow operatives (and suspects) like the suave Colonel James Stokes (Rege-Jean Page), his office affair Dr. Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris), the womanizing Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and his girlfriend Clarissa (Marisa Abela), or classified boardroom briefings with team leader Arthur Stieglitz (a conniving Pierce Brosnan, who sheds his 007 persona) operate as powder kegs of lies, anxieties, and insecurities. In Soderbergh’s carefully crafted whodunit, national secrets are just as explosive as marital deceit.

Black Bag rests on each bait and trap set by Fassbender’s perfectly cast, stone-faced spy as he barrels towards the truth. Fassbender taps into a perfect register, exuding a cold remove and a quiet agony as he prepares for a dire truth to taint the love of his life. Blanchett is in top form as the vibrant and crafty Kathryn, and in tandem with Fassbender, she casts a spell that transfixes and unnerves in equal measure, capturing a romance that passionately burbles under the surface.

Armed with David Holmes’ techno-jazz score, Soderbergh’s spy drama doubles as an absorbing study of loyalty and marital resolve. In navigating the precarious knots of duplicity (both national and personal), Black Bag sneakily infiltrates its audiences’ own biases and preconceptions. It’s the perfect kind of cinematic morsel from a cunning filmmaker who edits and photographs his films under two different pseudonyms.

Black Bag is in theatres March 14