16 Jun SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL – ‘The Secret Agent’ is a masterwork of political paranoia and quiet devastation
There’s a moment in The Secret Agent when you realise you’re not watching a thriller in the traditional sense, even though all the surface elements suggest otherwise. You’ve got assassins on a mission, a man on the run, surveillance looming in every frame, and even a severed leg inside a shark. But as writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sinuous, sensuous, and increasingly surreal epic stretches past the two-hour mark and shifts from one narrative track to another with unhurried grace, what emerges isn’t a puzzle to be solved, or a clean revenge plot to be satisfied, but a study in the lingering stains of fear, grief, and disillusionment.
That it also feels tense and politically righteous while being this structurally experimental is a magic trick Filho pulls off without blinking. The Secret Agent is an act of remembering and resisting, a memory piece disguised as a manhunt, and one of the finest films of the year. Set primarily in Recife during the dictatorship-shrouded Brazil of the late 1970s, it’s steeped in a humid paranoia that Filho captures with astonishing formal control.
He leans into genre without ever being defined by it, allowing flourishes from noir, political thrillers, gangster cinema, and even creature features to colour the frame without dictating the tone. And yet, despite the movie’s shifting visual language and kaleidoscopic structure, it never loses its footing. This is the work of a director at the height of his powers, completely assured in his ability to layer personal and national trauma into a narrative that constantly folds in on itself. It’s dense but never impenetrable. Challenging but always rewarding. And in the astonishingly great Wagner Moura, Filho finds his perfect centre of gravity and a man whose every glance holds a thousand stories.
The film begins on the road, with Armando (Moura), a quietly intense figure with a weathered face and restless eyes, stopping at a remote gas station on the outskirts of Recife. A local man lies dead nearby, his body decomposing under the indifference of passing motorists and distracted police. When Armando is searched by patrolmen who seem more interested in intimidating him than solving any crime, he hands over his cigarettes as a quiet bribe. The exchange is quick, hollow, and quietly terrifying, setting the mood for everything to come.
From there, Armando heads into the city under the assumed name of Marcelo, seeking refuge and answers. He reconnects with his young son, his late wife’s father, and the flickering memories of a life he left behind. But he’s also being hunted, and the question of why, or by whom, becomes increasingly abstract the deeper we sink into the film’s sweltering atmosphere. As Marcelo waits for forged documents that will allow him and his son to escape Brazil for good, he begins to see the city’s rot more clearly. There’s Euclides (Roberio Diogenes), a local police chief whose oily cruelty is barely veiled under a sheen of bureaucracy, and there’s a pair of hitmen, Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone), brought in to dispose of Marcelo with surgical efficiency.
The threat is constant, though Filho allows things to simmer rather than boil. In between the plot movements, we drift through cinemas showing Jaws, through streets choked by Carnival chaos, and through memories that may not be real. The titular “agent” isn’t just Marcelo. It’s history itself. It’s fear. It’s the slow drip of authoritarian control over every crevice of daily life. Filho isn’t interested in easy answers. He’s exploring what it means to be watched, to be known, to be haunted by decisions made both personally and nationally. And in doing so, he crafts a mosaic of slow-burn dread and aching beauty.
If all of that sounds like heavy lifting, it is. But Filho isn’t a slog of a filmmaker. He’s playful, even sly, in how he lets genre expectations lull the audience into a sense of narrative momentum before pulling the rug out and revealing something far more fractured and intimate. One moment, you’re watching a hitman plan a grisly kill shot. The next, you’re in a nostalgic reverie about the lost glory of movie theatres. Then you’re detouring into a surrealist sequence involving the myth of the “hairy leg” that’s terrorising a gay cruising park. You just have to trust Filho knows where all this is leading. Trust me, he does.
The tone oscillates without ever snapping. That balancing act would collapse in lesser hands, but Filho juggles it all with an almost musical rhythm. It’s a master at play and the end result is nothing short of breathtaking. In fact, this might be his most formally ambitious work yet, a spiritual sequel to Bacurau in its anti-fascist rage, but closer to Pictures of Ghosts in emotional texture. The Secret Agent has blood and bullets, yes, but it also has tenderness, regret, and memory stitched into every frame.
Much of the credit for the film’s success belongs to an Oscar nom-worthy Moura, whose performance as Armando/Marcelo is one of quiet devastation. Moura plays a man splintered by grief, by guilt, by the corrosive weight of a regime that devours its own citizens. He never overplays the anguish. It’s all there in his stillness, in how he listens more than he speaks, in how his eyes dart not from fear but from fatigue. His character isn’t a classic action protagonist. He’s not especially brave or resourceful. He’s someone trying to survive in a country that has already decided who should live and who should disappear. Moura makes Marcelo feel simultaneously like a symbol and a real, flesh-and-blood person. His stillness becomes a site of resistance. It’s the kind of extraordinary performance that will stay with you for an eternity.
Technically, the film is ravishing. Evgenia Alexandrova’s cinematography doesn’t merely capture Recife, it maps it like a haunted geography, where shadows stretch like fingers and the air feels thick enough to choke on. The camera floats, prowls, and occasionally jolts with a horror-movie logic, enhancing the unease that permeates the story. There are moments that evoke De Palma in their composition, complete with split diopters and surveillance-style framing, but Filho isn’t doing homage for its own sake. He’s drawing from cinematic language to critique power, to reframe what it means to watch and be watched.
Matheus Farias and Eduardo Serrano‘s editing, too, is daring, especially in the film’s final stretch, where chronology begins to warp and timelines blur. It’s here that The Secret Agent becomes truly audacious, introducing contemporary signifiers that force the audience to reevaluate what we’ve been seeing and when. Time folds back on itself, not as a trick, but as a statement. The production design from Thales Junqueira is meticulous too, evoking the late 70s in a way that feels lived-in, not airbrushed. Recife breathes in this film. It remembers. And it mourns. The soundtrack choices are sharp and often unexpected, with needle drops that comment on the action without being overbearing. Filho combines a brilliantly diverse mix of tracks that range from traditional Brazilian songs and lively Carnival beats with English bangers like Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” and Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby.”
For a film that spends much of its runtime in near-constant dread, The Secret Agent finds real moments of levity and warmth. Marcelo’s scenes with his son are sweet in their simplicity. A sequence involving a cinema projector and a well-worn reel is unexpectedly moving. Everything involving the severed leg is played for dark laughter. Filho loves his city and its people, and even when he’s showing how violence permeates their lives, he doesn’t strip them of joy.
That said, the film isn’t without its indulgences. At over 150 minutes, The Secret Agent may test the patience of those waiting for traditional payoffs. It’s easy to define as a slow-burn, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it had me gripped throughout. Some characters vanish as quickly as they’re introduced. Others seem to exist primarily to thicken the thematic stew, rather than to serve the narrative. The film’s final stretch, while brilliant in intent, could leave some viewers adrift in its temporal gymnastics. But these are the kinds of flaws that come with ambition. Filho swings big, and if some of those swings are messy, they’re still thrilling to watch.
And that’s ultimately why The Secret Agent resonates so deeply. This isn’t a film that hands you a moral takeaway on a silver platter. It demands attention. It respects the audience enough to ask them to sit in discomfort and ambiguity. But it also gives you everything you need. The emotional arc is there. The political fury is there. The cinematic invention is overflowing. Filho doesn’t just want to tell a story about a man trying to escape a dictatorship. He wants to show what it feels like to live under one. The compromises, the fear, the small betrayals and quiet acts of rebellion that stack up like bricks in a collapsing wall.
The film’s final image is a gut punch. Not because of what it reveals, but because of what it withholds. In a film about surveillance, absence is the final act of resistance. We are left not with closure, but with silence. And in that silence, the echoes of state violence, lost chances, and generational trauma ring louder than any gunshot. If there’s one truth that emerges from The Secret Agent, it’s that history doesn’t stay in the past. It festers. It reanimates. It whispers in the ears of the present. Filho has made a film that refuses to look away. And in doing so, he demands we don’t either.
Filho understands that genre isn’t just style. It’s a language. A way to talk about horror without cheapening it. A way to talk about memory without making it sentimental. And in The Secret Agent, he uses that language to ask hard questions about complicity, about survival, about what gets erased and who gets remembered. It’s a film about ghosts, living and dead. And it’s one of the most vital cinematic experiences of the year.
Distributor: Madman Films
Cast: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Candido, Gabriel Leone, Carlos Francisco, Alice Carvalho, Roberio Diogenes, Hermila Guedes
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Producer: Emilie Lesclaux
Screenplay: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Cinematography: Evgenia Alexandrova
Production Design: Thales Junqueira
Costume Design: Rita Azevedo
Editors: Eduardo Serrano, Matheus Farias
Music: Mateus Alves, Tomaz Alves Souza
Running Time: 158 minutes
Release Date: TBC (Australia)