‘The Secret Agent' Review: Wagner Moura Tries to Leave History Behind in Kleber Mendonça Filho's Beautifully Remembered Period Thriller

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25-05-2025

In his 2023 essay film 'Pictures of Ghosts,' a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife's once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that 'Fiction films are the best documentaries.' If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto.
Born from the process of researching 'Pictures of Ghosts' (a fact that becomes rewardingly self-evident over the course of its 158-minute runtime), 'The Secret Agent' recreates 1977 Recife with even more vivid detail than Mendonça's documentary was able to restore his childhood vision of the city through archival video and photographs alone. Focused but sprawling, the director's first true period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the 'Brazilian Miracle' that marked the height of the country's military dictatorship, and yet all of those signifiers — along with most direct evidence of the military dictatorship itself — are sublimated into the movie's pervasive sense of mischief.
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That's the word Mendonça uses to identify the time period in the film's opening title card, and it accurately sets the scene for a story less rooted in the terror of Walter Salles' 'I'm Still Here' than in the wistful barbarity of Wes Anderson's 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' Of course, those movies both hinge on the tragic poignancy of their stolen pasts, and this one does too — but slowly, and with a much softer approach to the way that memory persists in spite of the gangsters who might work to erase it.
Far from the high-octane spy picture that might be suggested by its title (a title that's easy to imagine written in giant letters across the marquee of Recife's São Luiz Cinema), 'The Secret Agent' only bumps into espionage tropes as if by accident, and its protagonist seems to be as confused by them as we are. Mendonça's movie operates at the pace and tenor of a drama in exile, albeit one that's fringed with B-movie fun and stalked by a pair of unscrupulous hitmen.
The film's story begins in media res, and while the plot couldn't be easier to follow, it fittingly requires the audience to earn every morsel of the context they'll need to appreciate its power. A middle-aged man who marries the quiet confidence of a cowboy with the 'I don't want any trouble, here' demeanor of an extra who just wants to survive the trigger-happy Western around him, Marcelo could be an anti-military Communist, but he could just as easily be a tech researcher who has personal business in Recife.
That duality is at the heart of Wagner Moura's deceptively recessive lead performance — a performance that Mendonça mines for its errant sense of mystery from the movie's opening scene, in which Marcelo smooth talks a dirty cop at a highway gas station where a corpse has been rotting in the sun for several days. 'I'm almost getting used to this shit,' the station owner spits, alarmed at how fast he's adjusted to the reality of doing whatever business he can with a dog-eaten body lying next to the pump. Change comes fast in Mendonça's Brazil, and it's hard to blame people for doing their best to roll with the punches.
Marcelo eventually arrives in Recife at the height of Carnival ('91 Dead!' the newspapers exclaim, with plenty more to come), where he moves into an apartment complex run by a feisty 77-year-old woman who shelters dissidents in need of a place to stay as they look for a way out of the country. The space also provides a home to the parents of Marcelo's late wife, and to the young son they shared before she died. It even comes with a covert job of sorts, though we learn very little about the specifics of the counterintelligence network that lands Marcelo a gig at the government office that mints government identification cards. (Certain vagaries are essential to this film about filling in the blanks, while others merely chip away at our understanding of what's at stake.)
It's also the building whose archives might contain the only documented proof that his mother — disappeared from the Earth long before this story begins — ever existed in the first place, and Marcelo is determined to find it before he makes a break for the border. Alas, time will be of the essence here, as a bureaucrat who Marcelo crossed up north has dispatched a pair of contract killers to 'shoot a hole into his mouth.' And if they don't get him, Recife's shit-eating chief of police (Roberio Diogenes as Euclides) and his fascist deputies probably will, though he takes a shine to Marcelo that could prove useful in a pinch.
Including Marcelo and his kid, all three of the film's rival factions are father-son teams, a choice that highlights Mendonça's gentle emphasis on the relationship between lineage and identity — and the defiant notion that history is as hard to erase as DNA. 'Can I see my blood?' someone asks while in the process of getting it drawn, a simple aside that captures so much of what Marcelo is hoping to accomplish in this story, to say nothing of what has motivated Mendonça, whose mother was a historian, to excavate the memories of his hometown in films like 'Neighboring Sounds' and 'Aquarius.'
'The Secret Agent' doesn't really tie a bow on that motif until the final minutes, which are set within one of the jarringly sterile flash-forwards that are littered across this story, but Mendonça tends to prefer crisp texture over clear point-scoring (as fans of his more fun and anarchic 'Bacurau' could attest), and this vibrant memory palace of a movie isn't in much of a hurry to get to its punchline. That's mostly to its benefit, as the movie — always compelling, but sometimes more sedate than its material demands — is often at its most alive during its detours.
A scene featuring an agitated Udo Kier as a bullet-scarred Jewish tailor stands out for the contrast it draws between the permanence of scars and the mutability of the conclusions that people draw from them, while a loaded subplot about a disembodied leg evolves from a literary device to a full-blown Quentin Dupieux gag as Mendonça uses it to kick a hole into the fence between awful facts and urban legends. We also meet a cat with two heads, but I can't pretend to have a clear read on the meaning behind that just yet.
The cat-and-mouse chase that's fueling the plot does boil over into a gnarly shootout (Mendonça's approach to gore continues to be a thing of beauty), but, to the potential disappointment of anyone hoping for another hit of that 'Bacurau' high, 'The Secret Agent' is consistently less interested in action than consequence, and less interested in scene than scenery. You can feel the filmmaker's dream-come-true ecstasy at being able to recreate the golden age of Recife's cinemas, which backdrop several key moments and tee up a recurring obsession with 'Jaws.' Ditto the joy he gets from rendering the city's streets in magnificent widescreen, and filling them with punch-buggies, bell-bottoms, and so many great Tropicália-accented songs that the critic sitting next to me spent the entire movie Shazam-ing every scene. I obviously stabbed him to death with my pen at a certain point, but I made sure to steal his phone for reference when the screening was over.
That joy is contagious enough to feed into the bittersweet story Mendonça wrote as a conduit for it, and to deepen the ultimate impact of its argument that movies can manufacture a meaningful history of their own — one powerful enough to cut through the erosion of truth, and the official record of a country that might be too ashamed of its own reflection to honestly look itself in the mirror. With 'The Secret Agent,' Mendonça exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.
'The Secret Agent' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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