The Secret Agent Review: On The Run In Brazil

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is a sharp and complex thriller, with a fantastic lead performance from Wagner Moura.

The Brazilian director’s work is as professional as you like, but it has a subversive streak, twisting genre convention on its head. The Secret Agent is no different; it sounds like a thriller, but ends up in all kinds of modes depending on the scene, from hangout movie to horror. This may irritate some, and confuse others, but the exhilaration of the film comes from trying to guess its next move.

The unpredictability of The Secret Agent is something it shares with its setting. The opening text of the film notes that 1970s Brazil was “a period of great mischief.” Anyone who lived under the country’s military dictatorship of the time would tell you that’s putting it mildly, but Filho is a shrewd provocateur. His films come studded with moments that jolt you from your expectations. Aquarius showed exactly what your neighbors get up to behind closed doors, while Bacurau’s brief but full-on violence showed the denizens of the titular town weren’t backing down from their persecutors.

The Secret Agent has its moments too, but its biggest surprise is its commitment to an underlying streak of absurdism. The film opens with Moura’s Marcelo pulling up to a rural filling station, to find a dead body covered in cardboard lying outside it. The station attendant claims it’s a thief he had to shoot days before, but the police are too busy with carnival celebrations to investigate. This is just the first of many institutional failures Fernando will encounter on his journey, and he’ll be banking on such failures to get to his destination.

Marcelo is on his way to the city of Recife, where he’s hiding out over the carnival weekend. Who he’s hiding from and why isn’t immediately clear, but The Secret Agent finds joy in drip-feeding us those kernels of information over its steadily-paced two and a half hours. He arrives at his new lodgings, under the watchful eye of landlady Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria). She is one of a raft of characters that introduce extra genre flavors to the film. There’s romance (Hermila Guedes plays Marcela’s lusty new dentist neighbour), and even a little dark humour, courtesy of Udo Kier’s old German tailor. Filho adds so many details to locate The Secret Agent in its time and place. Characters rave about the possibility of seeing Jaws again, while Marcelo visits his in-laws’ cinema and spies some amorous goings-on in the crowd during The Omen, of all films. 

However, these fine details don’t readily betray the bigger gaps in The Secret Agent’s narrative. Marcelo visits his young son living with his grandparents, and the audience’s mind hums with questions. Where is the child’s mother? Why is Marcelo so determined to leave the country with him? Filho’s script is a spectacular tease, to the point that it even finds time for characters to get together and just chill out. They do not share our patience, but Filho invites us to get comfortable with them, and promises to reward our patience.

Even that title, The Secret Agent, is misleading. Without going into too much detail, it’s gradually revealed Marcelo is an academic in trouble with the dictatorship and their industrialist backers, and his lodgings are a halfway house on the way to escape. He isn’t a secret agent; he’s an agent of the state working to get out in secret. Even more subversively, we learn all this from the perspective of Flavia (Laura Lufesi), a researcher in the present day who is working on documenting experiences of the persecuted from the days of the dictatorship.

Comparisons can be drawn with Walter Salles’ awards vacuum I’m Still Here, but Filho’s film is more complex and challenging. It may not have the big emotional releases of that movie, but it hums with intelligence and patience, extrapolating the details of Marcelo’s experiences only at the pace he wishes to tell them. Moura is vital to Filho’s vision, terrifically selling Marcelo’s trauma with little more than a furrowing of the eyebrows or the slightest of frowns, lest anything bigger be spotted by the authorities.

While working temporarily in a civil service office, Marcelo brushes up against a variety of snooty officials and corrupt cops, while assassins close in to take him out. The soundtrack, a combination of the moody score by Tomaz Alves de Souza and Mateus Alves with a fiery samba-heavy choice of songs, drives the action forward. The music combines with Evgenia Alexandrova’s sunny cinematography to add to the heat of the plot’s machinations. Filho does deliver on the potential thrills of the title in the last act of The Secret Agent. The film explodes with the meticulously crafted tension that has built up over the previous two acts. It’s of particular credit to Filho and his editors Eduardo Serrano and Matheus Farias that we have stayed with Marcelo through thick and thin, as the film’s pace never flags, and the potential for violence forever whispers in our ears. 

The Secret Agent is specific to its time and place, but its refusal to cleave to any given conventions mark it as something special. Some viewers may not allow it to challenge them as it intends, but anyone on the fence should dive into its mysteries. By the time a poignant epilogue ties it all together beautifully, any audience doubts will have been assuaged. It’s not a spy thriller, but that doesn’t mean it can’t thrill in many unexpected ways.

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18-20, 2025. The film will be released in French cinemas on January 14, 2026.