The Secret Agent: a dizzying sum film (review)
After the intimate resistance of Aquarius and the pulp fable of Bacurau, Kleber Mendonça Filho changes era but not combat. The Secret Agent plunges into the Brazil of 1977 locked by the dictatorship. His most virulent and intimate work.
In 1977, during the Recife carnival. Armando, a former teacher on the run, takes refuge alongside other hunted activists in a pension run by Dona Sebastiana. Around them, the city is decomposing in a chaos of drunkenness and corruption: a human leg found in a shark panics the newspapers, while the local police make their crimes disappear under the noise of the carnival. Armando prepares his escape, tries to save a few papers, a few scraps of memory. At the same time, Mendonça interweaves other lines – a son, a country, an era which will later reawaken under other faces.
His film does not obey the logic of investigation: it advances by contamination – from the past into the present, from the document into fiction, from cinema into memory. Mendonça transforms his city into a paranoid labyrinth. Deserted gas stations, ruined buildings, dust-choked screening rooms: The Secret Agent is at once a thriller, a dream book and a declaration of love in the seventh art. From the opening shot, a yellow ladybug, a corpse under a cardboard box, two jaded cops: we think of De Palma, of Peckinpah. We think we’re watching a sweaty thriller, and then the film escapes – towards a haunted fresco where suspense dissolves into melancholy. Mendonça’s project is clear: to weave the fragile fabric of a country between traces and amnesia.
He can count on Wagner Mourafascinating, who plays a tired hero, consumed by doubt. His presence is enough to electrify every silence, every stolen glance in a mirror. Facing him, the women of the film – Flavia the archivist of the present, Dona Sebastiana the activist of the past – preserve a fragile fire against oblivion. The staging, flexible and feverish, mixes documentary and reverie. The carnival scenes explode with color before turning into a funereal trance. The leg found in the mouth of the shark or a Jewish tailor mistaken for a Nazi are all absurd digressions which expand reality and remind us that the dictatorship produced (still produces?) its own grotesque myths.
Mendonça assumes his excess: he overflows, rambles, explodes his story – like the memories of a country that refuses to be quiet. The freedom of the imagination acts as a rampart. We come across the Jaws poster, we hear the voice of Caetano Veloso in the credits, and a whole Brazil of images and music emerges. Nothing to do with name-dropping: The Secret Agent basically works like a tropical Roma, an interior journey where memories become political, extending the reflection started in Ghost Portraits. If he summons drama, satire and the pure pleasure of cinema, it is to remind us that in Brazil, subversion also occurs through spectacle.
It is therefore his most virulent and most intimate work. Born in 1968, Mendonça encapsulates the year of his sensory awakening and questions what history has made of this childhood. This mixture of hardness and gentleness composes an ode to revolt – through memory, through stories that refuse to die. Mendonça does not only evoke the dictatorship: he shows how its shadows persist in the present, under other faces.
Long, dense, sometimes deliberately disordered, The Secret Agent imposes its own breathing: a sensory stroll through the memory of a country, a meditation on what cinema can save from shipwreck. And when, at the turn of a reel, a projector turns on in an empty room, we understand that The Secret Agent is filming less a hero than a gesture – turning the light back on so we don’t forget.
Of Kleber Mendonça Filho. With Wagner Moura, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Candido… Duration: 2h41. Released December 17, 2025
