Black Bag 2025

The film opens in London on a Friday night. British intelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) meets with his superior, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgard). He tells George that five suspects have been named in the leak of a highly-classified software program called Severus. One of the suspects is George’s wife, fellow officer Kathryn St. James (Cate Blanchett). Meacham gives George one week to find the culprit.

George and Kathryn invite the other four suspects over for dinner. They are their coworkers and fellow spies – satellite imagery specialist Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), her boyfriend Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), the agency’s psychiatrist Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris), and Colonel Jimmy Stokes (Rege-Jean Page). George drugs their food to make them more relaxed, before Freddie tells the group about how George surveilled his own father and exposed him of his crimes. George turns things around by getting everyone to play a game where they come up with a resolution for the person sitting to their right. It gets to Clarissa, who says she wishes Freddie would stop sleeping with another woman. Things get more heated, and Clarissa stabs Freddie through the hand, though he seems too inebriated to care.

George starts to investigate Kathryn. He finds a ticket stub for a film, “Dark Windows”, in Kathryn’s bathroom bin, though when he brings up the film, she claims to have not heard of it.

Meacham is at home with his wife, when he suddenly convulses after appearing to be poisoned. George later finds out that Meacham died, but it is said to be a heart attack. He sneaks his ID card into Kathryn’s bag so that he can pick it up from her at work and sneak into her office. He finds a log on her computer about an upcoming trip to Zurich.

Kathryn goes to a therapy session with Zoe. They discuss Kathryn’s relationship with George and her devotion to her career, while she also prods Zoe with questions about her relationship with Stokes. Kathryn says that her superior, Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan), thinks her marriage is a liability. Meanwhile, Stokes finds George while he is fishing and informs him that someone in the agency used a fake ID, “Margaret Langford”, and is keeping 7 million pounds in an account in Zurich.

George later goes to Clarissa to ask her to redirect a spy satellite towards Kathryn while she is meeting a Russian operative in Switzerland. She reluctantly agrees to do so, with George watching in on the meeting the next day.

Stokes goes to a meeting with Zoe. They break off their relationship, and she tries to get him set with a different psychiatrist, but Stokes reminds her that he told her classified information regarding Severus, and he implicitly threatens her.

Stieglitz calls George, Freddie, and Stokes into a meeting to inform them of a breach. During the satellite redirect, a different Russian operative, Pavilchuk (Dan Dow), escaped from a safe house with a copy of Severus, with the intent to cause a nuclear meltdown. Stieglitz suspects someone on the inside of orchestrating this event, with eyes in George’s direction because of the redirect. After Clarissa tells Freddie she helped George, Freddie tells Kathryn that George suspects her of being the mole.

George and Kathryn eventually talk to each other regarding the issue and work to weed the mole out themselves. Kathryn gets Clarissa to track the Russian operatives and later confronts Stieglitz under the suspicion that he conspired to have Severus leaked to create a nuclear meltdown and destabilize the government, even at the risk of thousands of lives. The Russians are tracked down and blown up in a drone strike.

George has Clarissa, Freddie, Stokes, and Zoe put through a polygraph test to determine when each of them first learned about Severus. After George and Kathryn go over their research, they invite the four others over for another tense dinner party. Kathryn puts a gun in the middle of the table while secrets start to get revealed. First, George outs Freddie and Zoe for having an affair, which is how Zoe first learned of Severus. They also know that Stokes was working with Stieglitz to leak Severus and kill thousands, while Zoe and Freddie tried to use Kathryn to stop it. Zoe’s devout Catholic faith also prevented her from allowing Severus to cause a meltdown. Stokes grabs the gun and admits to his guilt, as well as to killing Meacham. He tries to shoot George, but the gun had blanks. George shoot Stokes dead in front of everyone. Kathryn uses this to warn the others to not screw with her and George’s faith in each other, before they all get rid of Stokes’s body.

Kathryn later tells Stieglitz his plan has failed. At night, George and Kathryn reaffirm their love for one another and remember that there is still the matter of the 7 million pounds left untouched in the Zurich account.

British intelligence agent George Woodhouse is told that his wife, Kathryn St. Jean, is one of the five in the agency suspected of being a mole that leaked Severus, a classified program that can cause a nuclear meltdown and kill untold thousands. The other suspects are their fellow agents, Freddie Smalls, Zoe Vaughn, Clarissa Dubose, and Jimmy Stokes.

George tries to work to find if Kathryn really is a traitor, though the two quickly discover they are being played. Severus was deliberately leaked as part of a plot by their superior, Arthur Stieglitz, along with Stokes, to cause a meltdown and destabilize the government. Kathryn uses Clarissa to track the Russian operatives who were being used for the leak, and they are killed in a drone strike. George and Kathryn invite the four suspects over for “dinner”, only to reveal their dirty secrets. Stokes admits to the plot, as well as killing George’s superior, Meacham, before attempting to kill George and Kathryn. However, the gun he grabbed had blanks, and George kills him.

Stieglitz is exposed while George and Kathryn reaffirm their love for one another.