Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 5, 2025
It’s the 1970s and Brazil is in, as the opening text tells us, ‘a period of mischief.’ Carnival season is in full swing and it seems to have left the nation in a state of madness. Dead bodies lie in the middle of dirt roads and nobody seems to care. A man’s leg has turned up in the stomach of a shark. There’s a cat with two faces. And in the middle of it is Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a mysterious man who is returning to his home city of Recife. All he wants is to reunite with his young son and live the life that has long been denied of him. But this is a time of dictatorship and corruption, and it’s all too common for men like Marcelo to be disappeared.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller is not, as the title would suggest, a spy movie. But it also kind of is. The Secret Agent is about persecution and identity in the face of mass cruelty and a regime that does not accept the slightest hint of dissent. The film doesn’t give itself away so quickly, though. We see Marcelo arrive in Recife to a safe house of sorts, led by the indomitable Dona Sebastiana (a scene-stealing turn from Tânia Maria.) Its many residents are runaways like him, refugees, even if they reject such categorisation. They find community under strenuous circumstances and provide cover for Marcelo, who is seeking an exit from the country. Filho certainly plays around with many tropes of the spy genre. We get the assassin stalk, the digging through filing cabinets for evidence, and the secret identities. Don’t expect anything like a James Bond movie here, though. This is an unhurried and study of both the personal and the political, of the collective madness of mass violence and Kafka-esque power struggles. Political genocide is both abhorrent and ludicrous, and in that disjointed middle ground, Filho finds his movie.
The messiness of the film plays to its strengths, revealing the pitch-bleak humour and moments of near-fantastical confusion that seem part and parcel with living under the iron grip of a dictatorship. Carnival is an opportunity for liberation but it’s also a convenient mask for the cops to get rid of some enemies. The news of a shark attack sends the public, already wired following the release of Jaws, into a tizzy. The tabloid press spins proudly ludicrous yarns of the dismembered leg going on its own kicking sprees, a moment depicted like something out of a Dick Tracy serial. It’s all wild, but it doesn’t seem any less ludicrous than the reality where murder is so casual that nobody seems to question corpses rotting in the street.
Wagner Moura, who you may recognize from Civil War and his turn as Pablo Escobar in Narcos, deservedly won Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his performance. Marcelo is weary but not fatalistic, even though he has every reason to be. He’s as much in charge of this tonal tightrope walk as his director, offering bursts of organic humour amid this very serious narrative. Marcelo is a good man forced down a rabbit hole of bullies and exploitation. At one point, he finds himself accidentally the acquaintance of Euclides (Robério Diógenes), a hideously corrupt police officer who has no qualms about bullying locals into being his performing monkey. Euclides’ attitude is not the default. This is a world full of people eager to do good. Alas, he is representative of the rot that inhabits the highest offices in the land. Frequent close-ups of the portrait of the Brazilian dictator on the walls remind us of his omnipresence.
Amid the oddness and capybaras, The Secret Agent is also a fascinating portrayal of masculinity. Characters talk frequently about what it means to be a ‘real man’, whether it’s wielding a gun or fighting in war or watching soap operas with your friends. Euclides introduces Marcelo to Hans (surprise Udo Kier cameo!), a Jewish-German refugee whose body is covered in scars that the cops demand to gawk at whenever they please. To them, Hans is both macho ideal and pathetic victim.
Filho is an immense talent who gets a lot into this one film, both dramatically and visually. It’s a gorgeous-looking movie full of impeccable Brazilian jazz (and also ‘If You Leave Me Now’ by Chicago) that captures the period with such verve. It should feel incongruous for this movie to swing from funny to sad to erotic to polemic, but it’s a thrilling balance beam of directorial control. This year, Brazil won its first-ever Oscar for I’m Still Here. A repeat would be more than deserved.
The Secret Agent had its North American premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It will be distributed by Neon later this year.
