"The Secret Agent"

☆☆☆½ 

A man named Marcelo walks into the lobby of a popular movie theater in Recife, Brazil, in early 1977. As he does, three women emerge from the auditorium, one of them in hysterics. Marcelo reports to the projectionist that one of the women appears to be possessed. "It's this movie," he says, and the camera shows us the inside of the theater, which is showing The Omen. The audience screams in delight.

Movies are at the heart of The Secret Agent, which isn't actually about movies, except that, in a way, it is. Movies are the escape for many Brazilians during the 21-year military dictatorship that ruled the country with authoritarian brutality. In The Secret Agent, one of the characters, Marcelo's little boy, desperately wants to see the movie Jaws. He's obsessed with it. Problem is, the poster alone gives him nightmares. Still, he's determined.

Movies are also the heartbeat of this film, which was written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacarau, Aquarius), and which contains sequences that revel in pure filmmaking. In one, a disembodied leg is reanimated and appears in a park where gay men have sex at night. The leg beats them up.

What are we supposed to make of this? Is it a metaphor? If so, for what? Politics? Sexual repression? Or is it all just a zany only-in-the-movies moment that also shows how, in 1977, long before cell phones and computers, everyone could be brought together by the most weird, wild, and probably untrue tall tales?

The "Hairy Leg" is just one strange moment in a film filled with strange and wonderful moments. The Secret Agent does tell a cohesive story, though in a relaxed and roundabout way. Once in a while, it punctuates the story with shocking violence, and occasionally there is a framing story about two students who are listening to audio tapes that chronicle the story of Marcelo and the way the oppressive, trigger-happy government targeted him for ... what, exactly?

It takes some patience to track the core of the story. It's easy for that patience to flag. It's easy to imagine Filho and producer-star Wagner Moura getting irritated by the demands of modern filmmaking, which at least suggest if not require a coherent, cohesive story. The Secret Agent gets there grudgingly.

It has set its mind, instead, on dropping us into Brazil in 1977, which the film calls, with droll understatement, a "time of great mischief." Do the filmmakers really believe that almost 50 years later they can look back at that time and not be filled with the bitterness and anger that fueled last year's I'm Still Here, a movie with which this film shares some surface-level similarity?

Interestingly, both The Secret Agent and I'm Still Here give us a glimpse of the damage the time, the country and its political violence wrought on generations by jumping, at the last minute, into the present. They share little else. I'm Still Here wanted to be a stark and affecting political thriller. The Secret Agent is going for something different, I think:

It's a movie about a time and a place. Like Cuarón's Roma, it wants to luxuriate in recreating the time, in letting us be there, and in that sense it succeeds with something close to perfection. I have no idea what Brazil in 1977 really felt like, but I'm convinced it must have felt something like this. It's that sense memory that most interests Filho. And in exploring memories, Filho does something special in The Secret Agent: He recreates the past much in the same way that humans recreate the past — disjointedly, honestly, filled with the sights and sounds and moods of the moment.

Watching The Secret Agent is like someone who lived through a time of great consequence try to tell you about it — they can't keep the narrative clean. They start by telling you one story, but in order to understand it, you really need to know what else was happening at the time, and to understand that you need to know about what the city was like, and to understand that you need to understand what it was like to go to the movies then, and to understand that you need to know what it was like living in a police state, and to understand that ...

And on and on. It might get dull and frustrating, except that the teller of the story has a special way of keeping you mesmerized. So it is with The Secret Agent. I'm still not sure of some of the plot points, but I'm absolutely sure that audience loved watching The Omen, and that the kid loved drawing the poster of Jaws, and I'm not going to forget that hairy leg anytime soon. So it doesn't matter if I didn't grasp the finer points of the story. I got what it really wanted to say. I think. And if not, I had a terrific time anyway.

Viewed January 14, 2026 — AMC Universal 16

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