The Secret Agent

The Anatomy of a Haunted City

*The Secret Agent* tells you what kind of film it is almost immediately. A bright yellow VW Beetle rolls into a country gas station. There's a corpse lying a few feet from the pumps, covered with a piece of cardboard and not much else. The attendant says it's been sitting there for days. When the police show up, they don't cordon anything off or ask a serious question. They extort a "donation" from the driver and leave the body for the flies. Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn't shoot the moment like a big reveal. He shoots it like routine. In 1977 Brazil, this is just another day.

I kept thinking about that body afterward. It sets the film's wavelength: not a propulsive thriller so much as a drained, watchful state of paranoia. After the large-scale sweep of *Bacurau* and the intimate memory work of *Pictures of Ghosts*, Mendonça Filho comes back to Recife and makes the city feel less like a backdrop than an accomplice.



Wagner Moura plays Armando—going by Marcelo when he slips into a safe house during Carnival—as a former professor hiding from the military dictatorship and trying to find his young son. Moura won Best Actor at Cannes, and it's easy to see why. He never turns Armando into a heroic symbol. He plays him as a man bent by history. In the identity card office where he works his cover job, his shoulders droop, his eyes keep checking the room, and his face stays locked in the blank expression of a bored civil servant. It's internalized panic, tightly held. Moura, who often works in a bigger key, is especially good when he lets all that fear stay under the skin.

Mendonça Filho is also too sly a filmmaker to stay in one register for long. Just as the movie seems ready to settle into a grim procedural, he introduces a bizarre thread about a severed human leg discovered inside a shark, while Armando's son fixates on posters for Spielberg's *Jaws*. It's absurd, maybe even a little destabilizing, and that's exactly why it works. The joke is sick but precise: an authoritarian culture can obsess over an imaginary aquatic threat while actual human beings are being disappeared all around it.



The ensemble gives the movie a wonderfully untidy pulse. Tânia Maria is excellent as Dona Sebastiana, who runs the safe house with equal parts fatigue and practicality. Udo Kier, in his final screen role before his death, turns up as a Jewish refugee who lets the police believe he's an ex-Nazi because that earns him more respect. It's a nasty, brilliant detail, the kind that says everything about a regime that admires the performance of cruelty more than truth itself.

Giovanni Marchini Camia, writing for *Sight & Sound*, called the film "a committed effort at salvaging historical memory as well as an intoxicating feat of filmmaking." That gets at the tension inside it. The movie veers from B-movie strangeness to plain, everyday terror, and sometimes that tonal weaving is exhilarating. Sometimes it drags. There are stretches in the back half where the pace loosens a little too much and the razor-wire tension of the opening starts to fray.



But I keep circling back to the messiness as a deliberate refusal. Dictatorships love clean stories. They love order, clarity, neat official versions of events. Mendonça Filho pushes back with a film full of side roads, half-healed memories, borrowed genres, and unresolved dread. *The Secret Agent* never offers the comfort of a grand overthrow. It stays with the ugly arithmetic of day-to-day survival. And by the end, it has done something harder than delivering catharsis: it makes you stare at the bodies history wanted you to step around.