O Agente Secreto

Kleber Mendonça Filho's Secret Agent is a film of striking visual elegance. Its art direction is nothing short of superb, reconstructing 1970s Recife with a sense of texture and atmosphere that is both raw and poetic. The city emerges not just as a backdrop, but as a living, breathing character - a mix of beauty, decay, and tropical melancholy. The film is also populated by a gallery of eccentric characters, embodied by an equally eccentric cast that gives the work a peculiar and often intriguing rhythm.

Yet, despite this sensory richness, Secret Agent ultimately feels weighed down by its own self-awareness. The screenplay is disappointingly unoriginal and excessively self-referential, operating more as a parnassian memorial to the director's own childhood than as a gripping piece of suspense. What could have been an inventive political thriller dissolves into a predictable collage of Brazilian clichés - corruption, nostalgia, and class tension - presented with a kind of weary inevitability that borders on pamphleteering.

Wagner Moura, despite critical praise, delivers an oddly muted performance. His restrained acting feels more absent than subtle, and the decision to have him play both father and son proves to be an unnecessary and somewhat embarrassing gimmick that adds little to the story's emotional weight.

In the end, Secret Agent stands as a technically accomplished but dramatically hollow film - a beautifully framed echo chamber where form triumphs over substance, and personal memory overshadows genuine cinematic tension.

Watched on Sydney Film Festival 2025

Watching Kleber Mendonça Filho's "The Secret Agent" feels less like observing a story unfold, and more like stepping into the humid, throbbing heart of Recife during Brazil's 1977 military rule. Forget the usual spy thriller beats; this is something far stranger, richer, and ultimately more haunting. It wraps you in the feverish embrace of Carnaval, not as spectacle, but as a desperate refuge for Marcelo (a profoundly compelling Wagner Moura), a researcher on the run seeking camouflage in the very city that birthed him.

What lingers isn't just the plot, but the film's insistent, almost physical question: what survives when history tries to erase itself? Mendonça Filho, a son of Recife pouring his own lifeblood into every frame, suggests memory itself is the battleground. He meticulously rebuilds a world - the textures of the time, the sidelong glances, the oppressive heat - not just for accuracy, but to etch onto the screen the stories official archives ignored. We feel the quiet terror faced by LGBTQ+ folk, witness the exploitation shadowing indigenous workers, see how the city itself becomes a living archive, a character pulsing with secrets and scars. Marcelo moves through it all with a fugitive's alertness, yet also with the weary, amused detachment of a tourist in his own collapsing world, adding a layer of profound melancholy.

The film possesses an extraordinary, unhurried confidence. It breathes. It pauses for moments of bizarre humour, startling eroticism, or pure, aching sadness. Mendonça Filho is a sensualist, weaving a tapestry of sound - distant drums, whispered conversations, the city's own rhythm - and texture. He isn't afraid of the surreal: a severed leg appears, sexuality is presented with startling frankness, and meanings shimmer just below the surface like heat haze, resisting easy capture. That deliberate pace, stretching towards two hours and forty minutes, isn't indulgence; it's the very fabric of the experience. It demands your presence, inviting you not just to watch, but to inhabit Recife's streets and Marcelo's precarious existence.

"The Secret Agent" isn't merely watched; it's absorbed through the skin. It's a challenging, deeply rewarding journey into the weight of the past and the fragile resilience of memory. This is filmmaking of rare courage, unafraid to linger in the uncomfortable spaces, to make us feel the ghosts whispering in Recife's humid air. It's a testament to the power of cinema to hold history close, ensuring some truths, at least, refuse to be forgotten.

The film has a Brazilian setting, not the stylized Brazilian setting, but one that makes you feel you actually know those people. In truth, the entire film gives this feeling.

It is a work that seems to be something you recognize. The way people speak, the "villains", everything is so symmetrically believable that the tension establishes itself naturally. The story does not deal with big points, it is the story of one person. Perhaps of many.

In this sense, the work is characterized by the characters, and all are very well realized and acted. Even though in certain moments scenes are prolonged in order to show these characters, as occurs throughout the film. Although time passes quickly while watching the film, it has many scenes that seem to serve only to extend the length of the work.

Even with its excesses, one of the greats of Brazilian cinema.

I like Director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who doubles up as script writer in AGENTE SECRETO. He pulls no punches when it comes to depicting reality in his beloved Brazil.

Over the course of its 160 minutes, AGENTE SECRETO portrays three men in the Solimões family of Brazil's Pernambuco State who have experienced in different ways the evils of dictatorship, with Wagner Moura delivering yet another magnificent performance as each of those men in their generation.

As other reviewers point out, this is an account of events in Brazil at a difficult time when dictatorship reigned over that marvellous and multicultured land, and Mendonça Filho hides no details hard to admit about one's country.

The dialogue floats from apparently normal conversation among common people to a growing realization that everyone is under threat. Photographs of then Brazilian dictatorial President Ernesto Geisel and other senior government officials hang in just about every office, corrupt policemen give cover to hitmen, welcome bribes and keep breaking the law.

In a film where you also get the amiable soul of Brazilians, the contrast comes from the main villain, the wealthy company owner Ghirotti well played by Luciano Chirolli, who wants university professor/researcher Solimões I's patent, and centralization of the university funding and operation.

That contrast also hits home with raw, at times exceedingly violent action, where JAWS (yes, the Spielberg-directed 1975 film) has a double with a human leg in it, and the supernatural intervenes as that leg suddenly comes alive, becomes hairy - kids laugh about comic pictures of the "hairy leg" in newspapers - and starts kicking people engaging in sex, and other compromising positions. A black Angolan woman displaying an excellent, just perfect diction of Portuguese Portuguese, keeps the residents at Solimões II's place informed about that leg. Why she and her husband appear in the film only baffled me, as they do not add to the narrative or action, other than they fled Angola and are on their way to Sweden.

The animistic, supernatural element also comes in with a scarecrow-like masked man on the side of a Pernambuco country road, which revisits Solimões II in his nightmares.

Add to that a cat with two faces and four eyes, at least two blind. One can interpret that in various ways. I see it as symbolizing the many angles of history and human memory.

Constantly in the background of dictatorial Brazil of the 1970s, the government poses an elusive but real and constant threat to all citizens.

Ultimately, nothing is sacred: two young girls are listening to tape recordings of Solimões II interviewed by a woman called Elza. How and why they have that supposedly personal and secret material, who they are - neither is a relative of the Solimões - and work for, is not disclosed but they have very modern high quality computers, so they are current generation.

A positive note emerges toward the end, with Solimões III at the helm of a blood donor unit, symbolizing the heart of Brazil pumping in spite of all menaces and democratic hiccups.

Superb period reconstruction - plenty of lovely VW Beetles, and other 1960s/70s vehicles on show - only heightens the enormous quality of Evgenia Alexandrova's cinematography, backed by highly effective editing by Matheus Farias and Eduardo Serrano.

I sincerely believe AGENTE SECRETO and actor Wagner Moura deserve Academy Award nominations as Best Foreign Film and Best Actor, respectively. 8/10.

"The Secret Agent" is a film I just saw at the Philadelphia Film Festival. Before I talk about the plot, I must warn you....this is NOT a film for kids or for those turned off by violence. The film features some brutal murders near the end and the story is certainly depressing...as it should be.

The story is set in Brazil in the 1970s. The nation had been under a military dictatorship since 1964 and the police in the film are uniformly shown to be evil. One of the people the police are looking for a man who you learn has done NOTHING illegal...he just got on the wrong side of a well-connected and evil man. So, much of the film consists of him hiding as well as various evil scum looking to kill him.

Is this a recipe for a fun film? Certainly not! But it is very well made and teaches us about a period in history we might not know much about and should! Well made and a sad film that might leave you feeling a bit drained by the time it's completed.