‘The Secret Agent’ Review: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bold 1970s Epic
Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a fugitive, arrives in Recife during Carnival week hoping to reunite with his son, but soon discovers the city is far from the peaceful refuge he imagined.
An epic that folds suspense, action, comedy, and drama into a single, unruly package, O Agente Secreto pushes well beyond its genre trappings. Underneath the pulp exterior runs a dense reflection on Brazil’s military dictatorship. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and Kleber Mendonça Filho pulls it off with remarkable assurance, sketching a vivid portrait of mid-1970s Brazil—a country that, behind a façade of good-natured normalcy, lived in a state of constant performance and quiet terror.
The “secret agent” of the title may or may not be Marcelo (Wagner Moura), and that might not even be his real name. As he arrives in Recife to see his son again, he’s reminded of how heavy things have become. Someone has been killed in a parking lot, the body left there for days while the police avoid the scene using Carnival as an excuse. Yet the moment Marcelo pulls up in his yellow VW Beetle, officers appear, rummage through the car, and demand a bribe to let him go. When he leaves, the corpse remains on the pavement—there’s nothing in it for them.
Over the course of the film’s first of three chapters, the Bacurau director throws more than a dozen characters and situations into the mix, many of them difficult to connect at first glance. Among the narrative offshoots: a shark-bitten leg (just as Spielberg’s Jaws becomes the latest box-office sensation), a missing woman, and a group of cranky Holocaust survivors drifting around the neighborhood (including a cameo by Udo Kier). Gradually, through a flash-forward set in the present—where university students analyze that period in Recife’s history via interviews and archival journals—a more intricate picture begins to form.
Marcelo may be digging up long-buried family information about his mother and wife, trying to reconnect with the son he can’t see and who waits for him in Recife. But he’s far from the only one living a double life. A number of characters, many of them part of a network quietly organized and sustained by women, move through this maze of contacts, disappearances, and clandestine escapes—hoping to find someone, learn where others have been taken, or, if possible, flee the country for Europe or wherever there’s refuge.
As in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds—one of many cinematic lineages Mendonça Filho channels as he blends pulp energy with darker, heavier undercurrents—the film’s threads converge inside a vast movie palace in Recife. The theater becomes a kind of headquarters for this underground resistance. Between screenings of The Omen, King Kong, and the endless lines for Jaws (Tubarão in Portuguese) gather many characters like Marcelo, including his father-in-law, who uses his office as another discreet node in the network.
Hints of John le Carré’s spy fiction meet the political paranoia of Costa-Gavras, or even Melville’s Army of Shadows, though Mendonça often stages violence with the raw, splattery impact of horror cinema—bullet wounds shredding bodies in a distinctly John Carpenter register. Through all this, he builds a textured portrait of life in Brazil, and especially in the Recife he knows and films so intimately, during a time defined by suspicion and coded behavior. When politically connected mobsters put a price on “Marcelo’s” head, The Secret Agent shifts decisively into gangster territory, becoming a full-throttle action film.
Expansive in spirit and scale, the movie functions as a period fresco in which characters, motives, and everyday detours collide and overlap—sometimes to the point of excess. Rather than leaning on the classic political-drama framework (present, but never dominant), Mendonça tells this story through the unruly language of popular genres: split screens, gore, musical interludes, and even a “killer leg” stalking rebellious kids.
Like his previous Pictures of Ghosts, the film also plays as a love letter to the cinema he grew up with and to Recife’s grand movie theaters. Marcelo’s son could easily stand in for Kleber himself—a young boy wandering through the city’s cinemas in awe, watching audiences scream at The Omen or develop lifelong phobias because of Jaws, then stepping back into the street and recognizing that the underground dread around him would someday become a film as well. His film.
