The Secret Agent

Time Out

21-05-2025

Something stinks right from the off in this twisty, tense, languorous 1970s-set Brazilian drama that captures the absurdity and suffocation of life under a corrupt dictatorship. It's 1977, and middle-aged Marcelo (Civil War 's Wagner Moura), is on the run from the north of Brazil to Recife, where he wants to reunite with his young son.
In the opening scenes of The Secret Agent, Marcelo pulls into a remote gas station in his bright yellow VW Beetle. There's a body lying under sheets of cardboard that's been there for days. No one dares do anything about it. The police arrive and needlessly harass Marcelo, trying to take a bribe for some empty reason. The vibe is set right away for a film which brilliantly captures the fear and sheer ridiculousness of a lawless state.
The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger. But it also has a streak of weirdness and offers a very human take on the political-crime thriller genre. It also has an explicit film lover's touch, with references to Jaws and key elements of the story set in and around a sweaty, sleazy cinema. There's even a daring and jaw-dropping scene with a severed leg hopping about a nighttime Recife cruising spot that feels fitting and also straight out of another film entirely, like a grim hallucination.
The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger
But most of the movie, which is written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau), feels horribly real. Marcelo isn't an activist or a dissident, but he's living underground because someone wants him dead: he and his wife, both academics, ran into trouble when a politician nakedly wanted to steal and commercialise their work. Now he needs to get out of Brazil. The stepping stone is to go underground and hunker down with a disparate group of outlaws in Recife, while holding a day job at the local public records office, where he's also able to search for documents relating to his late mother. Filho might portray several nasty pieces of work during the course of his story, but this is also a film packed with good, everyday people – not everyone follows the example of the president who we pointedly see in portraits of the walls of government buildings.
There are no straight lines or inevitabilities here. Filho takes his time, letting us soak up the steaming hot atmosphere of Recife at carnival time and occasionally cutting between the 1970s and today, with scenes of young researchers listening to tapes relating to Marcelo's story. It's not a true story per se, but it could be – especially as the film's most out-there element, the lively severed leg, is rooted in actual urban myth. It's a vital, transporting, curious film, familiar in some ways but totally unusual in many others.