The past is never the past is never the past — especially if you lived in Brazil in 1977, “a period of great mischief.” That’s the scene-setting intertitle that opens The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s extraordinary excavation of a bygone age of national repression that may or may not bear a striking resemblance to more recent ages of authoritarianism. It follows a montage of vintage black & white photos, both candid snapshots of everyday life and film stills, and the sound of two radio announcers bantering over “Samba No Arpège,” Brazilian composer Waldir Calmon’s popular 1957 hit. Two minutes in, and the movie is already mashing together eras and histories, the personal and the political, the real and the fictional. Disorientation is a key factor in Filho’s arsenal. He’s a filmmaker of great mischief.
No sooner has our hero, a widower who currently goes by the name Marcelo (Narcos‘ Wagner Moura), pulled into a rural gas station to fill up his bright yellow Volkswagen bug than he notices a dead body, rotting in the hot sun. Some thief apparently got caught trying to rob them last week, he’s told. The cops should be by to check it out any day now. When the police do show up, they ignore the corpse; they’re much more interested in shaking down Marcelo. He’s driving back to his hometown of Recife, a coastal burg he hasn’t seen in quite some time. The plan is to reunite with his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who’s being cared for by Marcelo’s father-in-law, and get the hell out of the country. In the meantime, he’s settled into an apartment complex run by an elderly woman with a soft spot for political dissidents.
Marcelo, it’s worth noting, is not a secret agent. He’s merely an agent of secrecy out of necessity, having once pissed off the wrong corrupt business tycoon back when he was a student running his university’s scientific research lab. Now he’s a fugitive, hiding out under an assumed name and working at the Institute of Identification — see: irony — until he can get a fake passport. Marcelo is also using his tenure in these local archives to find information on his late mother, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. There are also two professional hit men (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone), hired by that tycoon, that are hot on his trail. And what exactly is going on with the local police captain (Robério Diógenes), who may somehow be involved with the recent discovery of a severed human leg found in the stomach of a beached shark?
Those fans of the Elite Squad action films from the 2000s and Netflix’s Narcos, the ones who were early advocates for Moura’s moody, matinee-idol charisma, have felt justified in seeing the actor get meatier parts in films like last year’s Civil War and a co-lead in Apple TV’s Dope Thief. (His one-off in the recent streamer adaptation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith alongside Parker Posey is also a gas.) His work here, however, suggests there’s an entire range that he’s been keeping under wraps; watching Moura adding shades of gray this man on the run, adapting to Filho’s juggling of timelines and flashbacks, and, in one instance, doing double duty as another character, you feel that his Best Actor win at Cannes this past spring was beyond deserved. Paranoia is a key he’s played extremely well in other projects. But there are elements of sorrow, vulnerability, simmering rage, and a sort of weary resignation he adds to Marcelo that feel unique. May a thousand similarly complex roles come his way because of this.
And while Filho has never been adverse to switching up styles and mixing and matching genre elements — you’d almost think the Altmanesque ensemble piece Neighboring Sounds (2012), the class-rage parable Aquarius (2016), the grindhouse-a-go-go opus Bacarau (2019) and the cinephile memoir Pictures of Ghosts (2023) was made by four different filmmakers instead of one — the scope and ambitiousness of this extended period piece feels new for him. He sets you up for a Seventies-style political thriller, complete with assassins, corporate intrigue, corrupt cops, and mysterious corpses. Yet the movie soon adopts a kitchen-sink approach that incorporates everything from outré horror-movie sketches (watch out for that hairy, dismembered killer leg!) to musings about the joys of remembering old movie theaters. Marcelo’s story keeps everything connected and the humanity in the forefront, but the overall effect is still akin to surfing channels late at night, slipping from one delirious after-hours offering to the next.
There’s a master plan afoot in The Secret Agent, however, and one that its creator introduces in a shock cut that jumps forward to the present day. It’s an alternate narrative track that suddenly frames Marcelo’s story as something larger, knottier, more willing to puncture the spells of anxiety and nostalgia that it’s cast. Even when a major plot thread is abruptly resolved via a single glance at a newspaper story, the move pays off in a coda so sly that you almost don’t hear the sounds of hearts cracking. What initially seems like a series of cryptic aside soon turns into a bigger-picture revelation about what Filho has been chasing all along: the passage of time, and how it never really heals all wounds. That’s not really a secret. But it is a point that bears repeating, especially when its echoed in a movie as graceful and gratifying as this one.
