by Hudson Moura
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is less a conventional “agent” film than a meticulously assembled mosaic of 1970s Brazil. From its opening movements—stitched with the textures of the period, including television-like portraits, echoes of 1970s cinema, and songs that seep into character situations—the film builds a portrait of an era rather than a single plotline.
Formally, The Secret Agent is meticulous. Production design refuses nostalgia’s sepia: period color pops (plastic chairs, enamel signs, fluorescents, fabrics) restore the decade’s nerve endings. The sonic collage—TV, songs, street clatter—works like forensic ambiance, accumulating time rather than announcing it. The film’s most incisive line of critique, though, is conceptual: it maps the dictatorship’s violence onto private enterprise, showing how multinationals and local patrons captured ministries, universities, and police.
Recife is not merely a backdrop but a structuring principle, and the film’s cinephilia is embedded in its very world. A key figure is a projectionist working in an old downtown movie theater, and the film pays sustained homage to local cinemas. The result is a political film that understands culture not as ornament, but as infrastructure: the places where a society gathers, remembers, and—under authoritarianism—learns what must remain unsaid.
Set in 1977, described as a year “cheio de pirraça” (full of resistance), the narrative follows Marcelo—an alias for Armando—an academic who coordinated a scientific lab at a university and took too much freedom in confronting the hegemony of multinational corporations allied with the state. The film’s central political contribution is precisely this linkage: dictatorship is not presented solely as a state machine of repression, but as a system entangled with private corporations, operating through institutional control and personal gain. Marcelo/Armando’s flight becomes urgent when corporate forces unleash killers to chase him, pushing him to Recife to retrieve his ten-year-old son, Fernando, and attempt escape into exile.
Dona Sebastiana, who owns a building in Recife, becomes a crucial protector: her space shelters multiple people threatened by the regime—internal refugees of a political and economic order that makes dissent punishable. Around them, the film sketches a diverse gallery of characters, collectively producing a social portrait in which danger is not exceptional but ambient. A recurring shark leitmotif intensifies this atmosphere. Sharks are part of Recife’s coastal reality, but the film mobilizes them as a symbolic image of the dictatorship’s “teeth” during Ernesto Geisel’s presidency—predation as political order. One of the film’s most haunting details crystallizes this logic: the discovery of a human leg in a shark’s stomach, possibly linked to a disappeared agronomy student, compressing disappearance, bodily fragmentation, and institutional denial into a single disturbing emblem.
Midway through, the film reframes its own storytelling: Marcelo/Armando’s account is revealed to be based on recordings that two young women are transcribing in the present. The more they transcribe, the more they realize that official registers contain no trace of these lives, as if the people who confronted the authoritarian regime never existed. This discovery becomes the film’s governing argument: the violence of dictatorship extends beyond killing into the systematic production of erasure—an administrative and archival annihilation that converts lived experience into nonexistence.
That archival logic also explains the film’s deliberate refusal of closure. The ending centers Fernando and leaves the audience with a charged sense of unfinished business. The film withholds the complete picture in ways that can be frustrating—key biographical gaps remain unresolved, including the fate of Fernando’s mother, whose illness and death are invoked without clear explanation. Yet this incompletion functions as an aesthetic corollary of the film’s political thesis: under dictatorship, narratives do not resolve because evidence does not accumulate; memory is interrupted; truth is structurally prevented from becoming public. The title itself primes expectations of a more straightforward thriller—perhaps even an entertaining action arc—but the film instead makes the spectator share Fernando’s experience of being left behind by a story that refuses to settle.
The risk—and, for some viewers, the reward—lies in how the film withholds. Mendonça Filho pointedly denies the satisfactions of the political thriller. There is no cathartic expose, no righteous third-act swing. Threads remain frayed: the fate of Fernando’s mother; the exact contours of the state-corporate pact; the dossier that never coalesces. By the end, Fernando himself becomes the embodiment of the film’s ache: a boy who once waited at a meeting point for a father who never arrived, grown into a man for whom the past is a rumor he refuses to pursue. If Bacurau gathered anger into collective action and rough justice, The Secret Agent lets anger sit in the chest as unfinished business.
That choice will divide. On one hand, refusing narrative closure is ethically consistent with a history that still lacks it; it honors the wound by not stitching a cinematic scar where none exists. On the other, it can feel—especially now, when Brazil has begun prosecuting more recent authoritarian ruptures (heirs to earlier dictators who largely escaped accountability, even as some contemporary plotters received sentences of up to 27 years)—like anachronistic bleakness: narratively deflating at a moment that seems to call for a more dialectical reckoning. The film understands this tension; it stages it in miniature through the transcribers’ exasperation, the grandfather’s bitter prophecy that no one will ever be punished, and the spectator’s own impulse to demand answers from a reel that insists on silence.
Wagner Moura is the film’s most commanding presence. His performance carries an unusual capacity for metamorphosis—small shifts can reconfigure the character’s perceived position, as though identity were an unstable surface in a world where survival demands constant recalibration. That volatility becomes one of the film’s strongest dramatic tools: it makes the politics of masquerade feel bodily, immediate, and dangerous.
The film’s awards trajectory is as striking as its ambitions: it has an impressive collection, including major Cannes recognition (Best Director, Best Actor, and the FIPRESCI prize), Golden Globes recognition for Best Non-English Language Film and Best Actor, and a major Oscar presence with four nominations—Best Picture, Best Actor, Best International Feature Film, and Casting. This visibility matters not as prestige alone, but because it amplifies a film whose central concern is precisely the struggle over visibility: who appears in history, who is recorded, and who is erased.
In the end, The Secret Agent is most compelling when it treats dictatorship as an entanglement of state coercion, corporate power, and archival disappearance. What lingers is the method: a cinema that treats décor as document, streets as testimony, and projection as a politics of care. The Secret Agent is not a rousing dossier; it is a record of absences and a map of complicities, attentive to how private power learned to wear the state’s face. It leaves you with images that refuse to explain themselves yet describe, precisely, how a city remembers when files do not. A perfect complement to last year Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (Oscar of Best International Film 2025). The film replaces the pleasures of narrative resolution with the discomfort of historical incompletion, turning frustration into method. What remains is a political thriller that refuses the fantasy of justice, insisting instead on the reality of absence—and on cinema’s capacity to make that absence felt.What Gilles Deleuze would very aptly describe as a cinema of becoming.
Rating: 4.8/5