An oddly-paced yet riveting plunge into covert histories, Filho’s Cannes award-winning work plays like a spectral puzzle—pulpy, sly, and quietly haunting, turning Brazilian political trauma into a carnivalesque memory piece.

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Watching The Secret Agent feels like driving an old, creaking manual car up a steep slope in first gear, and then realising that what follows is only more hilly terrain. Up and down we go, like that sensational climactic car-chase sequence in One Battle After Another (2025).

It’s also a case of ‘now you see me, now you don’t,’ as Kleber Mendonça Filho’s fascinating work deals with the theme of covert history, experienced viscerally by the ‘agents’ at work during that dark ’70s era in Brazil, and from the vantage point of the present looking back.

Only that these ‘agents’ are ordinary people, unwittingly caught up in political violence. There is no James Bond-esque hero, even if the film’s marketing assets seem to portray Wagner Moura as one.

In fact, one might regard the titular figure as non-corporeal—a spectral entity that doesn’t try to right wrongs but becomes our temporal ally, revealing all that is shady, messy, and perplexing about that time.

Filho, one of Brazil’s standout directors, is decidedly more playful, haphazard, and sly with his filmmaking approach, whether tonally, structurally, or even sonically. 

“We need to protect what we still have.”

It’s the preternaturally gifted cousin to the more classically trained I’m Still Here (2024), which tackles a similarly traumatic subject matter, but what are the odds of The Secret Agent winning Brazil a second consecutive Oscar for Best International Feature? 

Moura is quietly restrained as a university researcher who returns to his hometown of Recife, in hopes of being closer to his child and finding some measure of peace after being targeted politically. 

But when a human body part is discovered in the torso of a shark (references to Jaws are aplenty; in fact, it was serendipitous that trailers for the 50^th anniversary of Spielberg’s iconic film played before screenings of Filho’s picture in many Brazilian cinemas), the sinister long arm—or in this case, hairy leg—of the ‘law’ that is the military dictatorship begins to terrorise. 

Oddly paced, but riveting in its own unusually pulpy way, Filho captures the carnivalesque violence of the ‘70s with aplomb, while setting a contemplative tone for the audiences of today. 

It’s like watching a movie about a movie—as we dive deeper into history, it seems more like fiction.  Yet it is through this fictive mode that we can even begin to feel like we have some grasp of an elusive, unfathomable past.

Grade: A-

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