OSCARS 2026: The Secret Agent (2025)

 

My favorite release of 2020 was “Bacurau.” That Brazilian thriller drew you in with an intriguing mystery that then headed towards a brilliantly engineered last act. It was both a clever work of social commentary and an extremely satisfying piece of pulp fiction. The film was co-directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, a critic turned director whose work has been continuously well received in his home country. Each narrative feature he has directed has won Best Film at the Brazilian Academy Awards and his last three movies have all been nominated for the Palme d'Or. Well, now it would seem that we ignorant Americans are noticing Filho as well. His latest fictional work, “The Secret Agent,” would earn a surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor at this year's Oscars. Considering this is the second year in a row that a Brazilian movie would break through into the top category, perhaps the Academy is noticing South American cinema more than before.

And like “I'm Still Here,” a movie that otherwise doesn't have much in common with this one, “The Secret Agent” is also set during the twenty year period when Brazil was ruled by a CIA-backed military dictatorship. It follows Armando. He returns to the city of Recife to spend Carnival with his son Fernando, currently living with his grandparents. He finds himself in an apartment complex run by communists and occupied by other refugees and political dissidents. Armando fled the city after making an enemy of a powerful electric company CEO. The same man has hired a pair of hit men to find and kill Armando. While attempting to reconnect with his son, Armando works at an identity card office, searches for information on his dead mother, and finds political allies based out of his father-in-law's local cinema. These story threads connect with the news of a human leg found inside a dead shark and researchers working in the present day.

From its opening scene, “The Secret Agent” establishes the tension ever-present in living under a violent regime. The first sequence involves Armando pulling into a gas station. A dead body lays on the ground out-front, the result of a shoot-out the night before. The proprietor of the business has simply covered the corpse up with some cardboard, not considering a homicide occurring right before him that outrageous. When the cops roll in, Armando has to present his documents. Before the details behind the character are even established, the audience can already tell that this guy has something to hide from the authorities. The near-by presence of death establishes a sense of pertinent danger, making us assume that the cops shooting Armando in the head would not be out of the ordinary. It turns out alright for Armando in this instance but that atmosphere of always being in danger, of the constant threat of being found out by the authorities, never leaves “The Secret Agent.” Characters must watch what they say in the privacies of their own home and assassins lurk the streets.

This is the world “The Secret Agent” inhabits and, of course, it was the real world for many people living in Brazil in 1977. While Armando's life forms the backbone of the film, the narrative often meanders over to numerous side characters. We learn details about the other inhabits in the apartment, like the elderly owner who is a former revolutionary and the refugees from the Angolan Civil War. We see the hit men go about their grisly business like it's any other job or the corrupt cops halfheartedly investigating the crimes. A lengthy digression features the cops harassing an elderly German Jew, played by Udo Kier in his final screen appearance. No matter how minor the characters turn out to be, we get this sense that they are fully formed individuals. The cat that lives in the apartment, which literally has two faces as a result of a birth defect, or the one cop always banging hookers in the records room feel as interesting and fleshed-out as the main characters. 

Yes, “The Secret Agent” does operate like a collection of snapshots of life in seventies Brazil. Filho was working on the film at the same time he was making a documentary called “Pictures of Ghosts.” I would not be surprised if many of the sequences in this movie were inspired by real anecdotes Filho collected while making that film. “Pictures of Ghosts,” however, is mostly a personal recollection of the filmmaker's childhood memories of growing up in Recife, filtered through the theme of the cinemas he frequented at the time. This too greatly informs “The Secret Agent.” The cinema setting makes clips of films a reoccurring element. We see “The Omen” attracting a crowd, especially after a publicity stunt of a priest performing an exorcism in the lobby. The trailer for Jean-Paul Belmondo action-farce “Le Magnifique” plays at one point, Filho seemingly taking the title for this movie from that one's Brazilian tagline. In particular, “Jaws” is a reoccurring motif here. After the story of the leg being dug out of the shark goes viral, Armando's son becomes obsessed with sharks and the “Jaws” poster. One can't help but assume that the boy is something of a stand-in for Kleber himself. 

It's mentioned that the boy is having nightmares about sharks too. This dovetails with an idea that many other filmmakers have observed in the past: That movies are not too dissimilar from dreams and visions. Easily my favorite sequence in the film brings a sensationalized newspaper story about that severed leg to life. It depicts the leg hopping around on its own, going on a horror movie style rampage through a park used for clandestine hook-ups by gay men. It's a burst of campy, outrageous comedy in an otherwise fairly grim movie. It also shows how the movie blends dreams, memories, and fiction with reality. This incident obviously did not actually happen, the bullshit yarn operating as a way for the paper to report on actual crimes without catching the attention of government censors. Once the movie starts to cut to the present day scenes, where recorded conversations of the past are unearthed, this theme is made all the more apparent. Movies are another way we reckon with our past, with history. Much the same way dreams and memories exist as forms to process our daily realities. 

There's a lot of interesting ideas in “The Secret Agent” and I wish the film held together as a whole better for me. There's not much of a narrative here. The focus on portraying bits and pieces from multiple lives, how the script slowly reveals the protagonist's past, the unexpected leaps ahead into the present: The result is a movie without much overall narrative coherence or forward momentum. “The Secret Agent” is on the long side, twenty minutes short of three hours, and I sometimes found myself wondering what the point of all this was. Too often, the movie feels like a collection of moments and characters in search of a plot. It comes together in its own way but I probably would have liked this more with a tighter narrative. That's obviously not the movie Fihlo was making, so it's more my problem than the movie's. 

The performances are strong, lived-in and realistic. Wagner Moura balances an undercurrent of anxiety and a struggle for normality in the lead. The cinematography is warm and concise. The editing is very well done. It's definitely a good movie and I'm glad I watched it. It does feel like an unexpected breakout success. The title suggests a more straight-forward genre operation but the film is, intentionally so, much more scattered than that. Not something you would expect the Academy voters to love a lot but, here we are. Filho certainly remains a filmmaker to watch. “The Secret Agent” is bold, interesting, insightful, meandering, shapeless, but singular. [7/10]