Rent The Secret Agent (2025)

Sharks, Dictators and an Exhausted Academic - The Secret Agent review by griggs

I expected a straight political thriller and got something stranger, slower, and much more satisfying. The Secret Agent drops us into late-’70s Brazil under the dictatorship, trailing Armando – here living under the alias Marcelo – played with exhausted decency by Wagner Moura. He’s an engineering academic who’s annoyed the wrong minister and now needs to smuggle himself and his son out before the state’s enforcers catch up.

Director Kleber Mendonça Filho takes that simple setup and builds a whole world. Armando is parked in a safe house run by the quietly formidable Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), handed a fake name and a job issuing real ID cards, and sneaking into the archives to dig for his mother’s records. Outside, carnival chaos, shark hysteria and casual police murder all rub shoulders. A grinning corrupt cop (Robério Diógenes) latches onto him, the papers lose their minds over a shark that’s eaten a human leg, and the real violence gets buried under urban myths.

The film is deliberately baggy; it lingers on side characters, odd jokes and an anxious little cameo from Udo Kier. If you want Bourne-style momentum, you’ll get twitchy. As a long wander through memory, media and everyday authoritarian rot, The Secret Agent is rich, sly and properly alive – the kind of film that keeps circling back the morning after.

Unsettling, intense and distinctly messy piece set in 1970s Brazil - The Secret Agent review by PD

The opening credits to director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film set the scene as Brazil, 1977, and then add, “a period of great mischief.” This is an appropriate description of the film itself, an intense and distinctly unsettling romp that includes secret identities, corrupt cops, intricate schemes, Carnaval frivolity, a severed leg inside a shark’s stomach, some very brutal action, a deliberately garish ’70s cinema style and a bit of thoughtfulness and emotion spread out over almost two and a half hours. The result is a film that's all over the place – coherence not high on its list of attributes. But its messiness is part of the point; a film that took itself more seriously than this one wouldn’t let a climactic gun battle turn into an almost cartoonish splatter-fest.

The director draws his inspiration from his memories of Recife in the late ’70s, from his mother’s work as an oral historian and from the style of some cinema of the era, with oversaturated, vivid colours. At the film's centre is Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a tech researcher who arrives in Recife during the riotous Carnaval week. Marcelo is fleeing something, but we’re not sure what, as he takes lodging in a nondescript building populated by colourful characters (including a cat with two faces) and overseen by an old woman who seems to be harbouring plenty of secrets of her own. But, especially in the early section, Marcelo’s story is just one of several narrative strands that remain stubbornly independent of each other: the corrupt policemen, their even more corrupt bosses, a human leg that’s found inside a shark’s stomach, two guys who seem to be very good at disposing of other bodies. It all begins to merge when those disposal experts are hired to hunt down and kill Marcelo by a powerful businessman that Marcelo had opposed when the guy tried to shut down a research institute years earlier, but no sooner has the film settled into this ’70s thriller vibe than a couple of young women show up sporting iPhones and Apple computers to help them listen to recordings made by Marcelo and others back in the day. It’s a jarring change, but then the women disappear for another long stretch; if they feel like odd, superfluous additions to the narrative, they’ll eventually prove not to be completely extraneous. The ending aims to be a more reflective and emotional coda, and it gets close to succeeding in that, but coming just half an hour after a crazed bloodbath and a sex-park romp by a severed leg, it’s hard to find your way there. Nevertheless, a film which is unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle, and the themes of love, loyalty, and the cost of integrity under tyranny. Intriguing stuff.