The Secret Agent Movie Review (SFF) –
Brazilian cinema is having a significant moment on the international stage at the moment. Whilst the country was producing movies as early as 1898, when Affonso Segreto filmed Guanabara Bay from the ship Brésil on a return journey from Europe, though no copy of the film remain, it is especially in the last few years that the worldwide public have really begun to embrace the South American scene. This is evidenced maybe most boldly in the surprise Best Picture nomination and underdog Best International Feature win for Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here at the recent 97th Academy Awards. And now, Brazilian auteur director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s own slow burn examination of the oppressive military dictatorship of Brazil has stunned audiences both at the Cannes Film Festival where it won four awards including Best Director for Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for star Wagner Moura, and now most recently as part of the official competition at the Sydney Film Festival.
But whilst I’m Still Here was a historical docudrama, The Secret Agent is an atmospheric and visceral recreation of the intense political climate of late 1970’s Brazil that follows a dissident in hiding, who is a composite based on the many university professors who were persecuted and exiled as internal refugees within the oppressive regime. It’s a temporal evocation that lets the shadows of the path ripple right to the foreground despite being a historical fiction. Wagner Moura, oozing classic 70’s style movie star charisma, magnetically invites the audience to journey with “Marcelo” for nearly 3 hours as he attempts to find answers and release from the questions that hang over him and the pursuants tasked with his demise.
” WAGNER MOURA, OOZING CLASSIC 70s movie star charisma“
Despite being set nearly 50 years ago, Mendonça Filho’s story of fascist resistance feels incredibly pertinent and timely given current world events. This is further heightened by the film’s narrative lens that follows a group of internal refugees who are in hiding in Recife, northern Brazil from their own government and living under assumed aliases. The entire ensemble is wonderfully assembled and utilised from corrupt cops to local resistance leaders to hitmen on Marcelo’s tail to a memorable and heartbreaking appearance from Udo Kier as a Holocaust survivor forced to show off his torture scars.
The Secret Agent is consistently confronting in its historical reality even as it utilises surreal moments to illuminate how humour and satire sustained a society that was deeply overshadowed by fear and haunted by abuse delivering a film that is both cinematically escapist yet deeply established in reality. A particularly noteworthy sequence adapts the real life Recife newspaper gimmick “The Hairy Leg” which was known code for the police. Whenever ‘the hairy leg’ AKA the police struck violently, the papers would run horror stories on the front page about the devastation caused by the hairy leg, and treat it as factual news, despite the absurdity of a hopping appendage kicking the teeth in off youths and degenerates.
Despite these bursts of surrealism, the film is far from being a high-octane spy thriller, yet it still manages to enthral as deep webs of corruption and deceit are revealed, both chronologically and in reverse from the present as it reflects and looks back on the past. The film’s audio researcher framing device, allows Mendonça Filho a level of objective gaze as he intercuts from the 70s to a present day archive worker listening to old tapes and trying to piece back together the hidden stories of the past. Cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova faithfully and atmospherically captures the period through time specific cinematic techniques which evoke films of the era whilst also paying homage to the staples of the espionage and political thriller genres throughout, with this stylised visual language noticeably different during scenes that are set in the present.
Overall, The Secret Agent is a simmering examination and evocation of a tense political reality that plagued Brazil during its years subjugated under military dictatorship, that recreates the visual tone of the era and features a career-best performance from Wagner Moura that captivates and envelops the audience into Mendonça Filho’s reflective rumination on resistance and justice.
The Secret Agent is playing at the Sydney Film Festival, and will release in Australian cinemas in January 2026.
