The Secret Agent [2025]

 The Secret Agent is intimately linked to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s filmography – fondness for B-movies and old theatres, novelistic approach and meandering conversations underlined by subversive political subtexts, setting in Recife – while its ambitious narrative construct and period backdrop provided fascinating departures. This roguish, genre-bending and engrossing political thriller – crafted with aplomb and mischief, alternately devilish and melancholic, and interjected with deadpan humour and hilarious schlock – is situated in 1977, during Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship. Armando (Wagner Moura), widower and academic blacklisted for his political leanings, returns to his hometown using an alias to reunite with his young son and emigrate. He’s hosted by the vivacious, diminutive, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a retired anarcho-communist and antifascist partisan who provides refuge to political dissidents in her lively apartment building; he finds employment at an archival centre, for cover and hoping to find his vanished mother; and he’s aided by a resistance network who he meets at a movie theatre run by his kindly father-in-law, while a vengeful industrialist has engaged lethal father-son hitman pair – who in turn subcontract it to a vicious lumpen – to kill him. Meanwhile, an oafish cop (Robério Diógenes) harasses people for fun; sleazy newspaper stories about a “murderous hairy leg” have sparked public hysteria; revelries at the ongoing carnival provide an ominous counterpoint to the atmosphere of dread, paranoia and terror; and a young history student (Laura Lufési) in the present day is moved by Armando’s story while piecing together archival material on the dictatorship. Gorgeously mounted in sunny visuals and anchored by Moura’s magnificent turn, this unfolded into a smouldering and multi-layered meditation on political and cultural memory, pointlessness of violence, and passage of time.

Director: Kleber Mendonca Filho

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil