Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius, Bacurau), The Secret Agent is set during Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s, yet it feels urgently alive in the present. This is not a straightforward political thriller, nor is it a nostalgic period piece. It is an expansive, original, and tonally daring epic that blends intrigue, absurdist comedy, grotesque violence, and bureaucratic paranoia into something altogether singular.
At its heart is Marcelo, played with remarkable depth by Wagner Moura (Narcos, Civil War). Marcelo, a widower and father, is a former academic engineer whose life unravels after he challenges a corrupt government minister attempting to privatise his university department’s research for personal gain.
What begins as a professional dispute escalates into something far darker: the minister deploys two monstrous hitmen, Bobbi and Augusto (played by Gabriel Leone and Roney Villela), to eliminate him. Marcelo is neither a revolutionary nor a committed ideologue; he is simply a man who refuses to be quietly erased.
We first encounter him driving across Brazil in a conspicuous yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Stopping at a deserted petrol station, Marcelo is dismayed by the fact that a dead man has been left to rot in the sun for days just outside the shop. When a police car approaches the forecourt, he at first believes the officers are there to remove the body, but he soon realises they are actually there to extort him of what little he has left.
Forced into hiding, Marcelo is taken to a safe house in Recife by a clandestine resistance group. There, under the warm and quietly commanding care of Dona Sebastiana (beautifully portrayed by Tânia Maria), he joins other political “refugees”. In a stroke of bitter irony, he is given work inside a government department that issues official ID cards, despite living under a false identity himself. Bureaucracy becomes both refuge and threat.
While in Recife, Marcelo is reunited with his young son, who has been staying with his in-laws. His father-in-law runs a local cinema screening Le Magnifique, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, advertised grandly as “The Secret Agent“. The film-within-a-film becomes an ironic echo: Marcelo is no glamorous spy, yet he is being hunted like one.
In one of the film’s most audacious narrative threads, the local population, already whipped into a frenzy by the release of Jaws, erupts into hysteria when a shark is caught with a human leg in its stomach. Tabloids spin rumours of a supernatural “hairy leg” prowling the city at night. Political repression morphs into urban myth, black comedy, and collective hallucination. Mendonça Filho masterfully shows how authoritarian systems distort not only justice but reality itself.
Stylistically, the film invites comparison to masters without ever feeling derivative. With its patient, inevitable drift towards violence and visceral reactions of disgust, the work evokes the spirit of Dogme 95 while offering something entirely new. The Secret Agent presents Brazil as a society fractured by its differences, both economic and racial.
The film also features an unforgettable cameo from Udo Kier as a troubled tailor, an appearance that feels surreal, slightly comic, and oddly heartbreaking all at once, especially since this was the actor’s last film before his recent death.
What makes The Secret Agent extraordinary is its refusal to conform to thriller expectations. It does not rush; it lingers. It allows scenes to breathe, detour into eroticism or absurdity, or sit quietly with grief. It understands that tyranny is not only enacted in moments of overt brutality but in paperwork, whispered rumours, institutional indifference, and opportunistic corruption.
Wagner Moura’s performance is just formidable. He offers Marcelo is thoughtful, wounded, calculating, and deeply human. Moura avoids heroics; instead, he gives us a man navigating moral compromise, paternal love, and existential dread.
The pacing may test viewers expecting a conventional thriller, but for those willing to surrender to its rhythm, the payoff is devastating. A masterwork of modern political cinema, and one of the year’s most daring achievements.
