Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho has created an operatic, beautifully acted, and fascinating film in THE SECRET AGENT. I am utterly unsurprised that it has wowed critics and is cleaning up this awards season.
The film is basically about corruption, oppression and memory, and it takes place over many time periods to show us the corrosive nature of autocracy. The heavy cloud of violence is shot through by an on-going absurdist folk-tale of the "hairy leg" and jaunty popular music, both of which seem to say, look what happened, isn't it insane?
As the film opens we are in the late 70s in Brazil. The state is corrupt at every level. The actor Wagner Moura (CIVIL WAR, Pablo Escobar in Narcos) is driving his beaten up car to his home town in the middle of carnival. He pulls into an isolated gas station where a decaying corpse lies under cardboard. Pretty soon the police pull in but they aren't here for the body and provide no help to the petrol pump attendant. Rather they just want to shake our protagonist down. Welcome to Brazil.
As the film goes on we realise that our "secret agent" is just a university professor called Armando and he's on the run because a local corporate boss with govenment contacts wanted the value of his research. He shows up in Recife and stays in a safe house full of similar political "undesirables" including a couple who have fled from Angola. The eccentric den mother/landlady fits them out with new identities. In flashback, we see our young idealistic professor get ensnared in the corruption of the system. In a third timeline we will see a young idealistic researcher uncover audio recordings and newspaper clippings describing the escape lines run by our den mother, what happened to Armando and to his now grown son, who claims to have no memory at all of the events. Is he lying? Is it a coping mechanism? Is it just safer?
The film is beautifully constructed, not least in its visual and musical evocation of late 70s Brazil. The costumes, cars, locations, score are all superb in evoking a beautiful but oppressive culture. I loved the interweaving of the hairy leg stories and the patience to tell us about Angola and the various ways in which cruelty suffuses the world - not least in an iconic final performance from Udo Kier as a jewish immigrant. I also loved the construction and scoring of a final act chase scene. But ultimately this film rests on the shoulders of Wagner Moura, who plays two roles in three timelines and captures the idea of a good but not perfect man caught in an inescapable trap. His performance is mesmerising and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Leo DiCaprio in ONE BATTLE. Speaking of which, there's an essay to be written on the thematic and plot similarities between the two films, and the sense in which the late 70s paranoia provides the perfect analogy to our present time.
THE SECRET AGENT is rated R and has a running time of 161 minutes. It played Cannes, where Wagner Moura won Best Actor, Telluride, Toronto and London 2025. It was released in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on February 20th 2026.
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