Review: ‘The Secret Agent’ is full of arthouse surprises and genre thrills
2025 / Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: City of God, One Battle After Another, and fending off a corrupt, dictatorial government while living with a two-headed cat.
Marcelo (Wagner Moura, Narcos) pulls up to a rundown gas station in his bright yellow VW Beetle, but hesitates due to a rotting corpse covered in cardboard. The station attendant beckons him forward and says the man was shot trying to steal gas, and the police have been too busy with the Brazilian Carnival to come and get him. It seems convenient that the cops instantly pull up, but they don’t care about the body. Instead, one intently searches every inch of Marcelo’s car, and we tense up, wondering if he has anything in there. Finding nothing, the cop asks for a bribe and leaves, listening to a song by the band Chicago, while the attendant chases the dogs away from the corpse.
This is the “cold open” of The Secret Agent and perfectly sets the scene with a mix of the offbeat, mystery, and the constant threat of violence. Taking place in the city of Recife in 1977, Marcelo is either there in hiding or for a secret mission in an apartment complex run by Dona Sebastiana, an immensely fun, tiny, cantankerous old lady. Information is kept at a distance from the audience, with many of Marcelo’s conversations appearing to withhold information or speak in cryptic terms.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s (Aquarius, Bacurau) film eventually gives us most of the answers while painting a vivid portrait of life in the Brazilian dictatorship with a dash of grindhouse, Coen Brothers, and Wes Anderson. Besides the opening corpse, Marcelo encounters a variety of odd characters like the corrupt police chief who takes a shine to him and a Jewish holocaust survivor (Udo Kier in his final role) who everyone mistakes for a Nazi. We see movie palaces of yesteryear, two-headed cats, and follow the story of a severed hairy leg who, legend has it, attacks cruising gay men in the park (depicted in an absurdly fantastic scene). Many of these encounters neither advance the narrative thrust nor remain unresolved, but they contribute to this depiction of a time we infer Brazil would rather forget.
This unique conspiratorial stew makes for an experience like little other, held together by a top-notch performance by Wagner Moura. Moura can sell Marcelo as both a potential secret agent capable of great violence and an empathetic everyman who may simply be trying to outrun a corrupt system.
There’s little doubt why The Secret Agent has seen rave reviews and ended up on many critics’ Best of 2025 lists with its mix of arthouse surprises and genre thrills. I’m still not sure what to make of some of the plot threads that seem to go nowhere or of random details like the two-headed cat, but I suspect this film will continue to reveal itself over time on repeated viewings and is likely a masterpiece. Only time will tell, or fade into a distant memory.