The Secret Agent Review: A Pulp Fiction With Political Resonance

The title of writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last film was Pictures of Ghosts, and his latest, The Secret Agent, opens with pictures of ghosts, too, of a sort. They are black & white photos of a bygone Brazil, pictures of 1970s-era merrymaking – drinking, singing, dancing. You’d never imagine these photos were taken in the midst of a military dictatorship, which is a point Mendonça Filho is making, without a whiff of hectoring – that life goes on, even under a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Indeed, as The Secret Agent makes plain over its nearly three hours, life must go on, especially under a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Any similarity to actual persons or current creeping authoritarian states dead or alive … well, let’s just say there’s not not resonance there.

From there, The Secret Agent bursts from monochrome to dizzying color: blue sky, verdant green, and a bright yellow Beetle pulling into a rural gas station. There’s a dead body in the dirt, tastefully covered over with cardboard. The Beetle’s driver, Armando (Wagner Moura), notes the dead body – is unnerved by the dead body – but also, a guy’s gotta get gas. A surprise encounter with the police, who’ve spied a chance to extort a motorist, reveals even more about Armando: That he keeps his cool, stands his ground, knows how to bend (he’ll hand over his pack of cigarettes) but not break (his wallet stays firmly in pocket). 

We’ll come to learn more about Armando, who is driving to his hometown of Recife under an assumed name, but Mendonça Filho takes his time teasing the mystery. Is he a secret agent? An undercover cop? A fugitive from the law – or what counts as the law in lawless times? In addition to the taciturn Armando, Mendonça Filho fills the frame with juicy, indelible characters – crooked cops, dirty bureaucrats, dissidents, hit men, and disgruntled academics – while his plot pulls in the kind of visceral kicks you might expect from a genre film: a body in a trunk, a rotten leg in a shark’s belly.

A former film critic and programmer, Mendonça Filho and his team recall throwback genre cinema further in the editing choices and the way the camera moves – wipes, dissolves, and split-screens turn Armando’s straightforward road trip into something exhilaratingly kinetic – but his background in film informs The Secret Agent in even more literal ways. Armando’s decent but exhausted father-in-law Seu Alexandr (Carlos Francisco) is a film projectionist at a movie palace (also the focus of documentary/film essay Pictures of Ghosts), where Recife audiences are going wild for The Exorcist; meanwhile Armando’s young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) is obsessed with seeing Jaws. Those film markers orient The Secret Agent in time, but there’s also something fascinating burbling under the main action – that tension in finding succor in fantastical stories when real life has plunged into stranger-than-fiction territory. An exchange between grandfather and grandson over whether or not he’s old enough to watch Jaws spells it out. “You’ll have nightmares,” Seu Alexandr warns. Fernando’s reply: “I already have nightmares, Grandpa.”

The underlying dread powering The Secret Agent could give the viewer nightmares, too, which makes the pure adrenaline pleasure of the piece feel a little subversive. The period detail is a marvel, the era’s music (largely Brazilian with some American pop dropping in) a most excellent groove, and the cast a top-to-bottom wowzer of interesting faces and eclectic bodies. (Tânia Maria’s 76-year-old chain-smoking landlady might be my favorite character of the year.) Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance. Already well-established in Brazil and getting better known stateside for his roles in Narcos and Civil War, there’s no way Moura doesn’t emerge from this a major international star. He won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival – where Mendonça Filho and the overall film also picked up prizes – and it seems foregone they’ll eventually land at the Oscars. I imagine they’ll be in good company there, next to a simpatico picture, One Battle After Another – another thrilling entertainment with dead-serious things to say.

This article appears in December 19 • 2025.