Eye For Film >> Movies >> The Secret Agent (2025) Film Review
Cannes Best Director winner Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, Brazil’s Oscar submission and a highlight of the 63rd New York Film Festival) stars Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor) as Marcelo, a technology researcher and widowed father of a young son. Marcelo is at home in the fine tradition of flicks where the fact that they are an agent is mainly a secret to them. The respectable men in Hitchcock’s thrillers who find themselves at the centre of a diabolical plot of national political importance, or the figures of intrigue with their tight shirts buttoned low and just so, like Jean Paul Belmondo, who solve an urgent mystery are of the universe where Marcelo belongs.
It is the time of carnival in 1977 and he is on his way to Recife, the director’s hometown in the north-east of Brazil, which Kleber Mendonça Filho single-handedly turned into a place now recognizable to international movie dreamers. Especially his previous film, the documentary Pictures Of Ghosts, which features a lot of archival footage, seems to hold The Secret Agent inside of it, like a Russian doll, or maybe it is the other way around, as both films inform each other so much.
Marcelo, on the road in his yolk-yellow VW Beetle, stops at an isolated gas station, where a dead body lies covered haphazardly by cardboard in the blazing sun, attracting flies and wild dogs which the station attendant tries to shoo away. The police isn’t expected before Ash Wednesday. Violence is presented as casual, ordinary. This year’s carnival death toll is at 91, we learn at some point.
The regime is brutal and that’s why Marcelo wants to pick up his son and get out of there. Before that can happen, he has to stay for a while in the safe boarding house, under the loving custody of Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) who takes care of a diverse group of refugees and owns a Janus cat with two faces, a real condition that also symbolizes beautifully and eerily much of what is happening.
The mix of absurdity and realism, mischief and horror in the topsy-turvy season of carnival allows for anything to occur. A dead shark with a human leg inside has been discovered, which introduces two themes of the film in one gorily funny wretched pile of flesh. Marcelo’s son, who likes to spend time with his grandfather, Mr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), projectionist at the local cinema (no doubt inspired by a real person we know from Kleber’s Pictures Of Ghosts), is obsessed with Jaws.
In a cameo, Udo Kier as German tailor Hans shows the WWII bullet wounds that ravaged his leg. References to the devilish 'Hairy Leg' striking again are used as commonly understood code in the local papers to write about corruption and misdeeds of all sorts by police and business officials. No better symbol could have been chosen. The cinema plays The Omen, with Gregory Peck battling the pre-adolescent anti-christ, who keeps his mythologically hairy goat’s leg hidden, while Marcelo finds out he is under a death threat and begins to have contact with resistance agent Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido).
Their conversations, decades into the future, will be heard by two women, piecing together what actually occurred during this time of turmoil in Brazil, so long ago, but actually not that far away at all.
Reviewed on: 25 Sep 2025
