Earlier this year, director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp delivered Presence, a transfixing ghost story about a fractured family, shot from a ghost’s point of view within the confines of a modest two-story house. Now, the duo returns with an entirely different picture—though one infused with Soderbergh’s signature voyeuristic elements—a stylish, crackling, London-set tale of spies and duplicity.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), are top employees at the National Cyber Security Centre. They are a sleek, sophisticated couple, seemingly devoted to one another, living in the trapped amber glow of their posh home. When Woodhouse receives a tip about a mole within the agency, he invites the group of suspects to his home in an attempt to suss them out. They have zingy names reminiscent of Clue characters: livewire Freddie Smalls (The Souvenir’s Tom Burke), Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela, recently the lead in the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black), Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), and therapist Zoe Vaughan (the always-excellent Naomie Harris, whose dry wit and cutting looks are a perfect fit for a Soderbergh flick). One of the suspects, of course, is Kathryn.

Koepp’s astute, clipped dialogue flows effortlessly. His best scripts—from Jurassic Park to Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible—somehow manage to be both goofy and erudite. The comedic banter among colleagues, the tit-for-tats in Dr. Vaughan’s therapy sessions, and a masterfully edited lie detector sequence (cut by Soderbergh, aka Mary Ann Bernard) are all unpredictable and beguiling.

With his debonair black frames and turtlenecks, Fassbender is one of the few actors whose expressionless face can still convey immense emotion and tension in a single shot. (Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick outfits the couple meticulously.) That’s why it’s especially amusing to see George ever so subtly crack—particularly under the pressure of agency boss Arthur Stieglitz (former Bond player Pierce Brosnan, whose innate gravitas commands the screen). The quiet fierceness and stoicism of Fassbender and Blanchett are among the reasons why the hijinks and one-upmanship that unfold are so effective. Are they knowingly playing games with one another? I was never quite sure.

Soderbergh’s dreamy cinematography (credited to his pseudonym Peter Andrews) luxuriates in a palette of brown, dark green, and black. The chilly sleekness of the agency’s corporate buildings and its high-tech apparatuses (including spy camera projections on screens) collides with the warm tones of tony bars, George and Kathryn’s home, and an inky lake in the countryside.

True to form, Soderbergh incorporates elements of technology into his storytelling—from the camcorder in Sex, Lies, and Videotape to filming Unsane on an iPhone. Once again, he blends old-fashioned, character-driven narratives with modern tech, revealing entertaining yet unsettling facets of surveillance (in Black Bag, for instance, lip-reading AI proves to be chilling). Yet, I love that the film’s most memorable mystery isn’t the one at the plot’s core (a malware capable of destabilizing nuclear weapons), but something far simpler and more tangible—a discarded movie ticket stub, a rare sight in this digital age.