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...