There is a scene early in The Secret Agent that says everything: a body abandoned on the street during Carnival, in an era when communication was difficult and the police could simply be tired. No outrage, no reaction. Just the brutal, silent logic of a country under dictatorship. Kleber Mendonça Filho — the Pernambuco-born filmmaker who conquered Cannes with Bacurau and redrew the boundaries of contemporary Brazilian cinema — returns with his most ambitious work yet, and arguably his most personal.
Set in Recife in 1977, a year the director openly declares to be the first he can truly remember, The Secret Agent follows Marcelo, a forty-something technology expert on the run who arrives in the city during Carnival week hoping to reunite with his son. What he finds is anything but a refuge. Wagner Moura — already an international name thanks to Elite Squad and Narcos — brings to the screen a man who carries no weapon, who is no hero in any conventional sense, but who finds himself trapped inside a system that spins beyond anyone’s control. An agent of chaos, rather than of power.
The film took years to take shape, and it shows — in the best possible way. Mendonça Filho dove deep into archives, into the physical memory of an era: the smells, the texture of time, the magnetic tapes his mother, a historian, used to collect oral testimonies. All of this becomes dense, layered cinematic material. The screenplay plays boldly with time: a flash forward catapults the viewer to 2025, where two young women in São Paulo find themselves holding a tape from 1977. Cassettes as time machines. Archives as acts of resistance.
“I think 1977 is the first year I can truly remember. Suddenly, we were always at the cinema. It was a moment of intensive film-watching, for reasons I only understood years later. The films of that period helped me build a memory of 1977. Fifty years have passed, but ironically — over the last ten years — it feels like we have gone back in time.”
Visually, the film is shot in anamorphic Panavision — the same choice as Bacurau — with that particular tension between a classic American aesthetic and a subject that is deeply, radically Brazilian. Mendonça Filho cites John Sayles, Robert Altman, and Brian De Palma, but above all Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Hector Babenco, whose 1977 Lúcio Flávio — raw, dirty, brutal — proved to him that a thriller could be authentically Brazilian without wanting to be anything else.
The result is a film that does not merely tick the boxes of the Brazilian military dictatorship genre (1964–1985), but captures something far subtler and more unsettling: the logic. The logic of a system in which justice is performed rather than delivered, in which people play roles written for them by others, in which the line between theatre of the absurd and reality grows dangerously thin. A film set in 1977 that speaks — with urgency and precision — to the present.
The international recognition speaks for itself: Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes 2025, two Golden Globes (Best Non-English Language Film and Best Actor in a Drama for Wagner Moura), the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Foreign Film, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association prize for Best Non-English Language Film. Add four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The Secret Agent is distributed in Italy by Film Club Distribuzione and Minerva Pictures and in the cinemas in early 2026.
For further information Mk2films.com.
