‘The Secret Agent’ Review: Wagner Moura Is Marked for Death in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Terrific ’70s Thriller (2025)

Carnaval provides a convenient cover story for nearly 100 deaths and disappearances in “The Secret Agent,” Kleber Mendonça Filho’s robust sense-memory immersion into the sights, sounds and suffocating climate — both political and meteorological — the Brazilian director associates with 1977 Recife. It was a period of great “mischief,” per the super-cinematic thriller’s opening titles, although that’s too light a word to describe the everyday corruption that permeates practically every aspect of this meaty, 160-minute period piece. Mendonça remembers it well, demonstrating how even the worst of times can inspire a perverse sort of nostalgia.

The 56-year-old director was just 8 years old when the film takes place — roughly the same age as Fernando, the son of his main character, a man of multiple identities played by “Narcos” star Wagner Moura — and it seems safe to assume that the boy’s all-consuming desire to see “Tubarão” (the Portuguese title for “Jaws”) was inspired by the filmmaker’s own experience. Mendonça shows a remarkable ability not just to re-create, but to transport us back to that time, with its oppressive heat and paranoia.

Throughout the movie, the men go to work without shirts — their only way to cope with the temperature — but that’s nothing compared to the everyday pressure put on normal citizens under the military dictatorship, whose grip endured for another eight years. Unlike Walter Salles’ recent “I’m Still Here,” this more genre-skewing project isn’t about political abductions — at least, not directly — as Moura’s “Marcelo” (not his real name) flees northern Brazil to reunite with his son.

En route to Recife, he pulls into a gas station, where a corpse lies covered in cardboard, a few meters from the fuel pumps — an image that could have been lifted from a Mario Bava movie of the same period. Life seems almost worthless in this world, as the lack of interest two federal police officers show in the dead body establishes why Marcelo can’t go to the authorities for help.

If it weren’t for the title, we might not realize we’re watching a suspense movie, and even then, that’s not really the vibe Mendonça is going for — despite stylistic choices that echo John Carpenter (Panavision lenses), Brian De Palma (split screen) and Martin Scorsese (pop-music needle drops). Like the filmmakers of France’s New Wave, Mendonça began his career as a reporter and critic, and that sensibility infuses every frame, striking an enticing balance between originality and homage.

Here, we find him in Hitchcock mode, as a well-connected government official has taken a contract out on Marcelo, forcing him to seek refuge with an old woman in Recife, who’s harboring half a dozen or so others like himself. Together, they represent a makeshift resistance movement, comprised mostly of “long-hairs,” gays and outspoken women.

The eponymous “secret agent” isn’t Marcel (a university research scientist), but could be a woman named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who arranged his alias, as well as a job for him in the identification office. There, he’s free to scour the records for any document that might be linked to his late mother, the significance of which becomes clear in the film’s present-day coda (where clean-shaven Moura appears in a second role).

It’s rather shocking when Mendonça first cuts from 1977 to a pair of contemporary university students, whose job it is to transcribe audio cassettes tied to Marcelo’s case — they’re unconventional candidates for secret-agent status as well, invisibly sifting through clues to reveal the past. There’s not enough evidence in Marcelo’s file for them to make sense of what happened to this man, but that doesn’t stop Mendonça from giving us the full picture, little by little, as a series of revelations, the way it might in a real investigation. But no authority is trying to right an injustice here; this informal inquest exists for our benefit alone.

On his first day on the job in Recife’s identification office, Marcelo observes the double standard at play in a system that protects the wealthy, while keeping the working class in their place — the same dynamic by which someone like himself could be snuffed without recrimination. That’s just one of many tangential critiques the director lobs at Brazilian society in a movie that might have clocked in well under two hours without such digressions.

Take a scene written expressly for Udo Kier, in which the cult star of “Bacurau” plays a German tailor, who lifts his shirt to reveal the scars inflicted upon him during World War 2. This Jewish immigrant is a source of amusement to the shady local police, but also a reminder of the way that survivors bear witness — whereas corpses dumped at sea take their secrets with them to the bottom of the ocean. Unless they’re eaten by sharks which are subsequently caught and studied by marine scientists. That’s one of the stranger things to happen in Mendonça’s slippery and constantly surprising narrative.

When the tabloids get wind that a human leg was found in a shark’s stomach, the public goes wild. Decades before social media, the story becomes a viral sensation, motivating local theater owners to bring “Jaws” back to theaters, while also inspiring outrageous reports of “the Hairy Leg” in the media. In a delicious, absolutely gonzo aside, Mendonça imagines these stories in the form of a shlocky exploitation movie, in which a disembodied limb lurks in the bushes of a local park, jumping out and attacking the gay men cruising there — suggesting how such stories were planted by the regime to discourage unwanted behavior.

As it happens, Marcelo’s father-in-law (Carlos Francisco) runs the city’s Boa Vista cinema, where “The Omen” is driving audiences to madness. Mendonça’s previous feature, the essay film “Pictures of Ghosts,” mourned the loss of Recife’s movie palaces, and that eulogy extends to “The Secret Agent.” Mendonça crams the film with vivid time-capsule details: vintage American cars and vinyl records, token-hungry phone booths and old-school printing presses, obscenely tight shorts and sweltering heat.

These elements all contribute to a powerful sense of place, which has literally been filtered through a cinephile’s lens. Mendonça shot the film digitally, using vintage camera equipment to achieve a high-contrast, anamorphic widescreen look consistent with that era. But there’s no mistaking a more modern sensibility, as the director shifts the focus from political dissidents to a different set of heroes: queer runaways and women of color, who sit with Marcelo in the film’s best scene, sharing stories which were likely never recorded, honored here for the first time.