It’s never entirely clear what’s going on in The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto), a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller from Brazil with lots of good hair and tasty roles for old dudes. Director/writer Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t even make clear until right near the end that it’s all taking place in flashback, yet another veil between the audience and his protagonist, Wagner Moura’s secret agent – of sorts.
There’s a lot of good things to say about this film but the plot is not easy to talk about. There just isn’t that much to it – Moura’s Marcelo/Armando/Fernando (depending on who he’s talking to) returns to his native Recife at carnival time, possibly on the run from someone, possibly hoping to slot back in to the quiet life. There, he is soon being looped back into anti-government activism by grizzled Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the spy boss (of sorts) co-ordinating its ragbag of refugees, activists and plotters against the Brazilian military dictatorship. His son is there too, being raised by grandparents since the death of his mother, though the son doesn’t feature that prominently. There is a hot dentist in whose chair Marcelo/Armando/Fernando is soon getting more than a clean and polish. She also doesn’t feature that much. Udo Kier (this is his final role – how sad) plays a German expat everyone is convinced is a Nazi on the run. In fact he’s a Jew with the scars to prove it. He’s not in it too much either.
Everyone, the understated Moura included, acts as a kind of prompt to its atmosphere, which is the film’s main concern. Hot, almost over-exposed visuals lend everything an overcooked feel. In the opening sequence, as Marcelo’s yellow VW Beetle pulls in to refuel at a sun-scorched gas station on the edge of town, the body of a dead man, covered over by cardboard, is rotting on the forecourt. Flies buzz around it. Dogs hover, hoping for a mouthful. The cops arrive, but they’re not interested in the corpse. Instead they’re there to put the squeeze on the new arrival in the Beetle, hoping for a bung.
Sleaze and corruption suffuse everything. Officially sanctioned murder is the name of the game and the man under the cardboard is probably a victim. Eventually a paranoid plot will emerge, kind of, and the systematic murder of a team of publicly funded research workers will become the focus of Fernando’s (possibly his real name) investigations. Which eventually makes him a target too.
If nothing else, the film is a reminder of a time when politics meant more than a fixation on pronouns. These are not happier days. “Mischievous times,” as an opening on-screen card tells us, somewhat ironically.
Jaws recurs as a visual theme – a human leg sticking out of a shark’s belly at one point. A police chief in a jaunty blazer. Which one of the men in the boat in need of a size upgrade is Fernando? The rational scientist, the dogged investigator, the hothead captain? Again, Moura is keeping his cards very close to his chest.
A portrait of a time and a place, when a country’s development is literally being held back by a corrupt regime interested only in lining its own pockets. An immensely cool heroic crusader at its centre. There’s opacity in every direction, though in its climactic moments the score by brothers Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves shifts into a rhythmic percussive gear reminiscent of Jonny Greenwood’s in the mid-section of One Battle After Another.
Things click into place. Tension mounts. There are stakes. But that’s not the bulk of the movie, which exists in a space between ignorance and understanding. A Parallax View for the 21st Century.
The Secret Agent – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
