The Secret Agent

I expected a straight political thriller and got something stranger, slower, and much more satisfying. The Secret Agent drops us into late-’70s Brazil under the dictatorship, trailing Armando – here living under the alias Marcelo – played with exhausted decency by Wagner Moura. He’s an engineering academic who’s annoyed the wrong minister and now needs to smuggle himself and his son out before the state’s enforcers catch up.

Director Kleber Mendonça Filho takes that simple setup and builds a whole world. Armando is parked in a safe house run by the quietly formidable Dona Sebastiana, handed a fake name and a job issuing real ID cards, and sneaking into the archives to dig for his mother’s records. Outside, carnival chaos, shark hysteria and casual police murder all rub shoulders. A grinning corrupt cop latches onto him, the papers lose their minds over a shark that’s eaten a human leg, and the real violence gets buried under urban myths.

The film is deliberately baggy; it lingers on side characters, odd jokes and an anxious little cameo from Udo Kier. If you want Bourne-style momentum, you’ll get twitchy. As a long wander through memory, media and everyday authoritarian rot, The Secret Agent is rich, sly and properly alive – the kind of film that keeps circling back the morning after.