When Armando (Wagner Moura) finally resolves to seek a fake passport and one-way ticket out of Brazil for himself and his young son, he asks his father-in-law to suggest a spot where he could meet a fixer. The old man recommends a room inside his place of work: a cinema. This choice (a movie theatre standing as the only safe refuge from death) is both hopelessly romantic and in keeping with the infectious cinephilia of Kleber Mendonça Filho, director of The Secret Agent, an unsettling and rousing thriller into which Armando staggers as a tragic hero. Anyone familiar with the Brazilian’s filmography will recognize these tributes as a recurring motif, but even neophytes will appreciate the affection he reserves for the movies––those who make them and the places that house them. A critic-turned-filmmaker, Mendonça Filho is the rare cineaste who can make his love palpable and contagious. When they don’t explicitly graft their touchstones onto present-day Brazil (as the rural siege western Bacurau did with the works of John Carpenter or Sam Peckinpah) his films often double as heartfelt paeans to theatres themselves. In his recent documentary Pictures of Ghosts, the Recife-born director trained his camera on venues scattered across his native turf (or what remained), asking us to contemplate the evangelical churches and rubble that replaced them.
For all that film’s nostalgia, a latent anger coursed through it––Mendonça Filho wasn’t just surveying some of his childhood haunts but suggesting the disappearance of all those brick-and-mortar venues amounted to a collective loss. This, too, was nothing novel. Fictional or not, the director’s work bursts forth with a simmering fury. You can sense that everywhere in Bacurau, named after a fictional village threatened by white psychopaths who go around killing its residents for fun, as well as Aquarius, in which a woman refuses to hand over her beachfront apartment to property developers determined to turn it into another luxury tower.
Rage echoes all through The Secret Agent. Set in late-1970s Brazil, it unearths a tragic chapter in his country’s history, when the military dictatorship that began in 1964 was using an economic boom called “Brazilian Miracle” as a smokescreen to imprison, torture, and kill all manner of dissidents and undesirables. Armando is one such target, but it takes a while for Mendonça Filho’s script to reveal from who or what he’s running. Agent clocks in at two-and-a-half hours and slots that late-night cinema rendezvous around its halfway mark. Only then does Armando spill the beans. A former university researcher, he once presided over a group of scientists looking for cleaner energy sources. It’s a pursuit the government saw as a threat to its own plans: a bigwig was sent to shut down the operations, Armando fought back, and nearly everyone he worked with and loved paid the ultimate price.
On the lam since he first graces the screen, Armando has come to Recife to reunite with his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) and drag him away from danger. He’s cut his hair, shaved his beard, grown a moustache, and changed his name. Now “Marcelo,” he spends the film’s first half settling in with a small gang of shellshocked refugees who, like him, have all gone into hiding and anxiously wait to flee the country. (Udo Kier, last seen in Mendonça Filho’s cinematic universe as head of the killers who laid siege to Bacurau, gets a small cameo as a Holocaust survivor, indicating a history of persecution that stretches far beyond Brazil.) That’s one storyline. But time and again he cuts to the present, interspersing Armando / Marcelo’s meanderings with those of a young university student, Flavia (Laura Lufési), hired to transcribe tapes of the confession he gave inside that cinema decades prior.
It’s a startling rupture that also feels of a piece with Agent’s grand design: staging an uncomfortable dialogue between past and present. Not unlike Pictures of Ghosts, the whole film is haunted by memory. This isn’t just apparent in its contemporary sequences. Agent foregrounds that interest from the start, opening with black-and-white photographs of people and everyday life in 1970s Brazil, and resurrecting 1977 Recife with a fastidiousness for its sounds and textures that belies Mendonça Filho’s love for the city as it must have looked in his childhood. It also helps that Agent is set during carnival, leaving Recife to teem with life at its most unruly and vibrant; though the film is cloaked in darkness, its frames are nothing short of ravishing.
By withholding information and only gradually allowing us to fill gaps, Mendonça Filho’s script operates in a mysterious key. But once the clues are finally revealed and Agent‘s puzzle coheres, that choice renders this journey more incendiary. There’s a painful urgency to his telling, yet this coexists with strange, pulpy detours––same flourishes that made Bacurau land in Cannes a few years back as a kind of UFO. A two-faced cat greets Armando on his arrival to the city. A leg––likely the limb of another regime victimis found inside the belly of a shark––and takes on a life of its own, hopping around Recife in a different subplot that nudges Agent closer to a gruesome B-movie affair.
We’re a long way away from the more stately, classical approach of Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, a work that’s only useful as a comparison insofar as it was recently made by another Brazilian and also happens to hone in on the dictatorship’s cancerous grip over the country. Mendonça Filho’s filmmaking is far more receptive to the surreal, and his cinephilia winds up shaping Agent’s style. Photographed by Evgenia Alexandrova in Panavision and rife with vintage wipe edits, split-diopter shots, and needledrops, it doesn’t just exist in conversation with the genre films from the decade in which most of it unfurls; it also testifies, time and again, to his unwavering belief in cinema’s capacity to disquiet and mesmerize.
The Secret Agent premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
