Black Bag

This delightful and dark picaresque from Kennard (The Transition) follows a mid-career English actor struggling to make ends meet. Looking for acting gigs, the unnamed narrator stumbles on an ad for a psychology experiment, which leads to steady work in which he zips himself into a black leather bag from head to groin and sits in on university lectures given by his employer, Dr. Blend. He is instructed to speak to no one in the class and not divulge that he is part of an experiment. Still, he engages in a submissive relationship with English professor Justine, in which he remains silent and zipped-up while she experiments with having sex with an “absence.” The narrator’s best friend, Claudio, an online gaming influencer with an appetite for rare hallucinogens, senses a way to monetize the experiment by creating Bag Coin NFTs and allowing online fans to track the narrator’s movements around town. Throughout, Kennard entertainingly pokes and prods at conceptions of identity, whether in sexual relationships or online personae (“We talk endlessly about sexual identity but isn’t sex more an escape from the self?” Justine argues). It’s a hoot. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (Mar.)