KIFF 2025: The Secret Agent Review | Wagner Moura Is Arresting In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Glistening Political Thriller

Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho is among the greatest storytellers in world cinema, with his ability to summon history, reconstruct it as well as take it apart with uninhibited pleasure. He’s not clipped by narrowing conceptions of how a certain kind of film should chug forth. In his glorious new film, The Secret Agent, he lets us luxuriate in sights and sounds of a particular time—1970s Brazil, especially his hometown Recife—that has long been at the center of his preoccupations.

With a nimble approach to history that’s at once steadily observant and slyly tenuous, Filho punctures trappings of a period thriller that disrupts and entices us further in at every turn. As we hop onto a precise moment in Brazil’s past, the opening says it’s a time of “great mischief”. Filho kicks off the drama with a sequence of heightened volatility—a sense of things about to snap—at a petrol stop where the protagonist, Marcelo (Wagner Moura) halts. There’s a corpse lying casually. However, the foreboding doesn’t get to explode right away; it bubbles up in Marcelo’s nightmares. Combining a smoldering charisma with measured witness, Moura rivets with undemanding, laidback energy

A political fugitive of sorts, Marcelo’s past is parcelled out in snatches. Grappling with turmoil, the loss of his wife, he’s remade his life, recast his identity as he moves to Recife, where he hurries to sort out his papers while being extremely wary before fleeing. His son, Fernando, is with his grandfather. Presiding over the apartment and community, Marcelo finds shelter in is the effervescent 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (a delightful Tânia Maria). She stands watch over a motley group of residents, who, in a terrific later scene, too hint at their own covert past. Filho could have easily leaned into a mythologizing Marcelo; but he grants Marcelo an unique position. The latter strikes as initially having a focalizing presence, but he’s very much one of many. There are other dissidents—those sought out by the military dictatorship that rooted out anyone with communist sympathies. Seemingly poised for an Oscar nomination next year, The Secret Agent is in clear dialogue with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024). While Salles spelt out the torture and trauma exerted under the regime, Filho situates the narrative via a social opacity. In his hands, history unfurls with a vivid, textured sense of the here and now, whilst also retraced, parsed, as in a parallel track with two present-day archivists poring over audio recordings.

The Secret Agent doesn’t try to compress the drama within just Marcelo. We can glimpse myriad strands and stories lurking at the edges even when it focalizes Marcelo. Filho keeps winking at wider histories tucked away without expressly underlining. Instead of an imposing political drapery, tensions carved out by the dictatorship hang in the air. It’s everywhere, but as a silent threat that billows into full shape right when one might have assumed they could do their own work separately.

Filho takes an allusive approach—gesturing rather than laying thick the critique. His ability to throw in cheeky subversions, a wicked genre explosion comes welcome amidst a stinging atmosphere. Jaws is doffed to several times. It naturally wends into one of the film’s most startlingly lively evocations—an urban legend around a disembodied “hairy leg” that goes rampaging around and targeting queer and proscribed sexual acts at parks. It jolts out of nowhere, a singular eruption as wildly grotesque as it is campily jocular. We sit up, enthralled with a filmmaker who can crank up abundant mischief and levity in a thrilling response to more solemn strains in the narrative. This brief indulgence feels like a direct descendant of the gory spectacle in Filho’s Bacurau (2019). Cinema and sensationalism are very much in the bones of this film, despite its pared-down register. How recollection and cinematic fiction are twinned here echoes Filho’s recent doc, Pictures Of Ghosts (2023). The filmmaker is keenly building an oeuvre whose disparate elements are conversing with and contesting each other.

When everything is so towed under within a particular regime, there sprouts a hidden language, special signs others must be able to read in. The hairy leg legend in film is only one of the many subtextual opportunities. A running thread around a carnival death toll that keeps multiplying includes the slew of brushed-away political murders set off by the ruling establishment. Filho’s playful voice bears no obligation to rouse high drama, saving bristling tension for a climactic stretch. We get stray flickers until they collide in an electrifying sequence, as hitmen close in on Marcelo. The Secret Agent finds bustling spiritedness in Thales Junqueira’s immense, intricate production design and a propulsive score (Tomas Alvez Souza and Mateus Alves). Chart-busters like “If You Leave Me Now” and “Love To Love You Baby” are braided into a soundtrack of doleful, tense strains. This brawny drama coalesces scale, political dimension and intellectual subterfuge. With sprawling intelligence, Filho paces through the many elliptical, interlocking moments. An early visual mark is invoked later, again and again, through haunted re-possession. With killer style to spare, The Secret Agent is sharply confident in how it wants to address and confront a specific time, its level of disclosure, and how nostalgia can be redrawn. Filho has made a film that quietly and fiercely simmers long after a spurt of action peters out.