Mischief, Thou Art Afoot: Filho Captivates with Seductive, Furtive Period Thriller
Pregnant with dread and jam-packed with homage to the tone and time of sweaty, paranoid suspense thrillers of the 1970s, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) is a masterful stroke of agitprop and absurdity. Led by a mournfully seductive Wagner Moura, Filho’s narrative is set almost exclusively in 1977 Recife, which we’re told in the opening frames as ‘a period of great mischief.’ Clearly a euphemism for rampant, widespread corruption, Filho unleashes a genre-fueled companion piece to something like Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024), another recuperation detailing the grueling experience of a family dealing with the forced disappearance of their father in 1970s Brazil. Hitchcock (and by visually aesthetic extension, De Palma) blaze to life in the fibers of Filho’s frames of a strange, fascinating man on the run.
No relation to the 1907 spy novel by Joseph Conrad, this murky tale of corruption and greed opens upon Marcelo (Moura), making his way to his native Recife. Out of gas, he pulls into an isolated gas station where a corpse lies rotting in the sun, a thief shot down during the week of carnival, with the police in no hurry to retrieve it. As providence frustratingly dicates, some cops show up as Marcelo is about to pull away, extorting his cigarettes, the only useful item he has to offer. The mood gets more mysterious when he arrives at an apartment complex greeted by the droll Dona Sebastian (Tania Maria), who it appears has agreed to hide Marcelo while he assumes a post in a departmental office responsible for issuing identification cards. He visits his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), being raised by the parents of Marcelo’s dead wife, who we learn died under suspicious circumstances. Reporting to his new ‘position,’ fate again finds Marcelo confronted by the law, the office transformed into a secretive locale for the recording of a deposition regarding the tragic death of a maid’s child thanks to the neglect of her wealthy employer. Euclides (Robério Diógenes), the crooked police chief, takes a liking to Marcelo, which later comes in handy. Soon after, we learn Marcelo is actually Armando, and a death threat has been placed on his head by a nefarious federal official, Ghirroti, who had dismantled the university department Marcelo/Armando had been the head of. An underground resistance offers assistance, led by the enigmatic Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), However, with two assassins dispatched from Sao Paolo to murder him, time is running out.
Filho divides the film into three parts, flashing forward to present day as two young women transcribe the tapes Elza left behind, including the eventually prominent Flavia (Laura Lufesi). Like them, we have become compelled by Marcelo/Armando the moment we’re introduced to the present, though their introduction suggests a happy ending is certainly not in store.
Filho, and his DP Evgenia Alexandrova, paint a vibrant, sweltering portrait of late 70s Recife during carnival, and though it’s informed by a handful of iconic films lurking in the periphery, The Secret Agent creates its own visual marvels and metaphors—a snapshot of Recife from the view of a window above an integral theater house is one of several breathtaking visual gestures. Another sequence, in the same locale, interposed with the women listening to the tapes, is pure genre gold, as Maria Fernanda Cândido interviews Moura, her mane of hair rustled by the breeze, the creepy soundtrack of the 1976 horror film The Omen eerily informing their own mounting dread.
Besides The Omen, Spielberg’s Jaws (and sharks in general) are a running theme. In the first leg of the film (pun intended), we’re introduced to corrupt police chief Robério Diógenes, a swarthy outlaw whose two ‘sons’ serve as his violent henchmen. They observe a leg being pulled from the gut of a shark being examined at an Oceanography Department—a leg that was attached to a body they were responsible for disappearing. The leg takes on a life of its own both in the media and the film itself, as Euclides goons steal the dismembered limb from the morgue and dispose of it once again, where it resurfaces at a heavily frequented queer cruising site. Filho unleashes his most fantastical moment as we observe the sentient leg, mottled and bloody, stomping around and violently interrupting amorous lovers, perhaps the only real moment of significant levity. The nightmares of young Fernando, all shark related, provide a metaphor for nature’s apex predators. Curiously, we learn from the adult version of Fernando (also Moura), his nightmares dissipated after finally seeing Jaws. Only the confrontation of monsters cures our unknown fear of them. But it doesn’t make the impact of their brutality any less drastic. Filho reunites with Udo Kier after 2019’s Bacurau, here playing a German Jew the police chief goads into displaying his war wounds from a previous generation’s defining misery.
The plot mechanics regarding why Armando is on the run and marked for death seem almost clandestine—-if because perhaps it exemplifies the frivolousness and barbarousness. Our introduction to the equally vivid assassins Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) finds them dumping the body of an old woman in Sao Paolo. We learn it was due to greed and inheritance. Armando was simply a man in the way of Ghirotti, a tyrant who believes his Italian blood makes him superior. A fantastically staged showdown between Euclides’ goons, the hired assassins, and a gritty subcontracted killer bleeding through the streets of Recife is yet another exceptional sequence, a culmination bolstered by all the meaningful details of Armando’s goals in his desperate flight out of Recife.
In its final moments, The Secret Agent recalls Filho’s 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, an exploration of lost and faded Brazilian movie palaces, the final site here with a theater now transformed into a blood bank. Elegant, moody, and intense The Secret Agent mines through the rubble of the past, reconstructing the beauty and terror of a time long gone but still haunting the present.
Reviewed on May 18th at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (78th edition) – Competition. 160 Mins
★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
