‘The Secret Agent’ Review: Kleber Mendonça Filho Returns with a Timely Tale of Brazilian Corruption and Persecution [A-] Telluride
One year after over-performing at the Oscars with the sleeper hit I’m Still Here, Brazil is poised to potentially do it again with another film analyzing the brutal effects of its military dictatorship, The Secret Agent. The film premiered at Cannes, where it netted a deserved Best Actor prize for its star Wagner Moura, and now brought down the house at the Sheridan Opera House on opening night at the Telluride Film Festival. The touching but also profoundly unnerving movie about corruption, persecution, and authoritarianism, is effective in its own right. But it also serves a grander purpose—an eerie reflection of current events around the world as well.
Moura plays Marcelo, a man who we later find out is on the run for his life. Marcelo got on the wrong side of an egotistical, greedy corporate technocrat who pays to get whatever he wants at a time in which the rule of law was entirely obliterated in Brazilian society. Marcelo longs to be reunited with his son, then under the care of Marcelo’s deceased wife’s parents. He arrives in the remote Brazilian city of Recife, where he encounters a network of good Samaritans determined on aiding folks that are being persecuted. He finds a refuge home, a temporary job, and a new identity. Soon, however, he realizes that his escape is not as safe as he had hoped it would be. The whole point of repressive, terroristic regimes is that they will find you even if you run and hide.
The Secret Agent is directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (who won Best Director at Cannes), best known for Bacurau, the futuristic, dystopian criticism of Brazilian inequality. Many of the same themes and styles reappear in The Secret Agent, including the notion that inequality begets political violence, and that there is little hope against profoundly corrupt, evil forces.
The film begins with a delightfully effective sequence, with Marcelo pulling his shiny yellow Volkswagen into a rural gas station. A dead body covered by a sheet and besieged by hungry dogs splayed across the parking lot, while the harried, half-naked attendant tries to brush away the cadaver as meaningless. A police car shows up, giving the gas station attendant hope that they will clean up the mess, even though Marcelo knows that he has attracted the cops for some form of extortion or shake-down. He is very clearly more educated than the cops or the gas station attendant, but they are all brought to an uneasy equality to the extent they inhabit a society where those willing to wield violence can get away with anything.
Once he is in Recife, local gangs of criminals, including the authorities, run roughshod and create a lot of the “mischief” that the movie’s opening titles promise you. One disappeared body turns back up, at least in part, when a dead shark yields the leg of a missing person. This leads the ghost-minded local populace to become convinced that a stray, hairy leg is roaming the city, randomly attacking citizens. Marcelo’s kid, meanwhile, is obsessed with sharks, having seen and become enthralled with the poster for Jaws.
The shark theme is not subtle, even though its ultimate meaning is also not entirely clear. The same is true for some of the movie’s other digressions. Mendoça Filho lays them out thick, even if he never makes clear what the motifs necessarily represent. Ultimately, these random digressions do not detract too much from the otherwise effective narrative. Its strength lies in the inherent likability of its central character, brilliantly portrayed by Moura, and in its surprisingly tight pacing, considering it clocks in at well over 150 minutes. Despite the repeated diversions, The Secret Agent manages to move along briskly, with an increasing crescendo of stress and threat, culminating in a thrilling third act that, as violent as it is, finally lets you exhale.
The Secret Agent is also thematically meaningful and relevant to today’s political environment. The anxiety that comes from observing entirely undeserved, targeted persecution hits a bit close to home. The hopelessness of these injustices, and the lasting devastation they cause ring as warning bells for anyone living in increasing authoritarian societies. Marcelo’s father-in-law pushes back on an activist’s declaration that “Brazil will pay” for the harm it did to some of its innocent citizens, proclaiming that it will “not pay back for shit.” This perspective, which would have felt unnecessarily fatalistic and overly cynical just a few months ago, feels all too realistic today.
And when The Secret Agent reminds you that Brazil exited that period only to see a brief return in the 2010s, and then to come back to a freer society, it only makes all this worse, not better. It could happen to them, it could happen to us, and it could happen to anyone. This is one of the many ways in which the movie is so gutturally effective—by making itself a universal and not just a local one.
When all is said and done, The Secret Agent will prove to be one of the most emotionally surprising and intensely thrilling movies of the season. Just one year ago Brazil’s film about a woman who resisted a military dictatorship and sought justice for decades felt like a touching historical curiosity. Now, the same topic feels disturbingly contemporaneous and even urgent. This may not be the cheery movie you want to see in the face of these adversities, but it is the movie you must see.
Grade: A-
This review is from the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. NEON will distribute The Secret Agent in the U.S. on December 5.
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