The Secret Agent: a masterful genre-inflected epic from Kleber Mendonça Filho

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Having already proved himself a virtuoso of scene-setting openers with Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019), Kleber Mendonça Filho pulls off a hattrick with The Secret Agent. A vivid yellow VW Beetle drives into a rural petrol station while titles inform us that we’re in Brazil in 1977, “a time of great mischief”. Not far from the pumps, a dead body lies under a sheet of cardboard and a swarm of flies. It’s been there since Sunday; the owner of the station tells the driver – it’s now Tuesday. Two policemen arrive but couldn’t care less about the corpse. They’ve come to ID the stranger and search his car. Finding nothing suspicious, they let him drive on, though not before extorting a bribe: his few remaining cigarettes.

This prelude drawn from classic Westerns (the film is even shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses) establishes the mood of everyday violence and corruption that runs through The Secret Agent’s genre-inflected portrait of life under the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 until 1985. The man in the Beetle, played by Narcos (2015-2017) star Wagner Moura, turns out to be Armando, a former head of department at a university in São Paulo. He is fleeing to Recife, his native city in the Northeast Region, having run afoul of people in power who wanted to embezzle the public funding of his research. Going by the fake name of Marcelo, he moves into a house alongside other “refugees”, as they call themselves, while waiting for his contacts in an underground network to supply him and his son Fernando with passports so that they can emigrate. Meanwhile, Fernando is living with his maternal grandparents; his mother, who worked with Armando, has died of illness, though it later transpires that she was murdered.

Mendonça Filho’s novelistic script introduces a large number of characters, frequently moving between scenes that take place in various locations and time periods. In the middle of the night, two hitmen drive to the Sérgio Motta Dam, in the south of the country, and drop the body of a woman into the water. A police chief in Recife is called to investigate after oceanographers find a human leg in the belly of a shark. Udo Kier appears as a German tailor whose body is covered in ghastly scars and who may either be a Nazi soldier or a Holocaust survivor. As if gathering clues, the viewer must gradually piece the plot together, which is in keeping with the theme of reconstructing history that informs the entire film and is underlined when, in a surprising moment, the action shifts to the present. Flavia, a university student, is listening to conversations from 1977 recorded on numerous cassette tapes, each labelled with the date of the recording and names of the speakers, all characters from the story.

The scene is brief and although the contemporary timeline is revisited sporadically, its significance is only revealed much later. This preoccupation with archival material extends the reflection that Mendonça Filho, the son of an archivist, began in the documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023). In that film, he considered how the cinemas of Recife, his hometown, influenced the social life of the dictatorship and shaped both his own and the collective memory of that time. One of these picture houses, the Cinema São Luiz, is where Fernando’s grandfather works in The Secret Agent and serves as a key location. Fernando obsesses about watching Jaws (1975) there because the iconic poster fascinates and terrifies him. That he is the same age Mendonça Filho would have been introduces an intriguing autobiographical element. Imagined from a combination of recorded history and personal recollection, The Secret Agent may be a fiction, but as the grown Fernando tells Flavia, who is herself attempting to make sense of Armando’s story from fragmentary evidence, “you remember my father better than I do.”

A consummate cinephile, Mendonça Filho is the rare director who conceives of cinema politically and as entertainment. The Secret Agent is a committed effort at salvaging historical memory as well as an intoxicating feat of filmmaking. Without missing a beat, it can depart from painstaking period piece into B-movie territory, satirising media-fabricated panic in a vignette about a sentient severed leg that goes on a killing rampage in a gay cruising area. Such confident skill, combined with the richness of the narrative and the impressively fluid storytelling, renders the film riveting for all 158 minutes of its running time. One is tempted to call it a masterpiece.