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| Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho |
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| Mendonça at Cannes |
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| Mendonça with Wagner Moura |
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| Mendonça on the set with Eugenia Alexandrova |
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| cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova |
THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto) B Brazil France Netherlands Germany (161 mi) 2025 ‘Scope d: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief.
Winner of Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes, while also awarded the FIPRESCI Prize, listed at #3 from the Film Comment Poll: Best Films of 2025 and #4 from the Cahiers du Cinéma: Top 10 Films of 2025, the film is an elegiac portrait of Brazil in the late 1970’s, set at the tail end of a fascist dictatorship when political violence and corruption were rampant, a time fueled by murder and misinformation, which seems to mirror what’s happening in America at the moment, as we’re seeing this same recipe for authoritarianism being played out on a daily basis, with a President and his Party setting the groundwork for fascism by routinely dismantling the fundamental cornerstones of freedom, like freedom of speech, the press, academia, public education, research and development, and the arts, and then replacing them with a politics of silence, where one shudders to think about what’s happening out of sight behind the scenes. Thoroughly manipulating the press and social media content, literally reviving a culture of racism, while systematically terrorizing black and brown neighborhoods, the President currently utilizes a para-military ICE goon squad, like something right out of Costa-Gavras Z (1969), as his own private army operating with impunity, answerable to no authority, with no government oversight, claiming they are rounding up immigrants, arresting and removing the worst of the worst when, in reality, 95% have no felony convictions, unlike the President, who is a convicted felon, guilty on 34 counts of fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal hush money paid to a porn star to buy her silence on his first run to the Presidency in 2016. Much like a dictatorship, which is all about dirty secrets and concealment, that pretty much describes this Presidency, as from day one the immediate attempt was to destroy the structure of government and eliminate all watchdog organizations, while at the same time firing all the scientists, doctors, economists, and the PhD’s while replacing them with party hacks and loyalists, people who aren’t remotely qualified to serve in these positions, whose only purpose is to rubber stamp the President’s agenda. The highly publicized, racially motivated immigration dragnet, largely in cities controlled by the opposition party, demonstrates a blatant disregard of the law both at work and in the courts, having a devastating affect across the country, as nothing stops this administration from continually regurgitating fabricated lies round the clock to the American people about what they’re doing, preaching that they’re making neighborhoods safe while routinely pepper spraying, attacking, and arresting U.S. citizens, journalists, and even Congressional representatives from the opposing party who question their actions and try to expose what they’re actually doing, as they’re continually seen slamming parents to the ground in front of their children, even pregnant mothers, before separating them from those same children, and then allowing them to die in record numbers (even greater than the Covid years) while incarcerated in abysmally overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, intentionally denying access to medical care which could prevent nearly all the fatalities (Trump Administration Deadlier for ICE Detainees Than ...).
Every year films with a popular political slant tend to get overpraised, which is not to say they’re not good films, but it’s questionable whether they rise to the level of greatness. This year those films tend to be dissident Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadef sadeh) (2025) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s portrait of Iranian political repression in The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Dâne-ye anjîr-e ma'âbed) (2024), as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s alarmist yet Academy-pleasing One Battle After Another (2025). To those we can add this film, a classically structured tension film that jumps back and forth in time, concerning the inheritance of fear, the price of resistance, and the need to unlearn the forgetting. Formerly a journalist and film critic before he began to focus on his career as a filmmaker in the 1990’s, Mendonça is the maker of Aquarius (2016), a film about a woman who refuses to sell her beachfront apartment to a developer, who wants to tear it down and build a skyscraper, so they try to force her out through increasingly abusive and violent means, and BACURAI (2019), a surreal Western about a corrupt and murderous scheme to secure water rights, both featuring the incomparable Brazilian actress Sônia Braga, while the documentary PICTURES OF GHOSTS (2023) analyzes how the city of Recife, the filmmaker’s home town, was once a cinema hub, and how the loss of its movie houses has reflected the city’s broader transformations over time. This largely subversive work is a more vividly detailed extension of that film, where the filmmaker expresses his belief, “Fiction films are the best documentaries.” The title is deliberately misleading and ironic, as the film isn’t about a classic John le Carré spy but a political refugee hiding in Brazil's 1977 dictatorship, alluding to his undercover life, the “secret” operations of the regime, and the elusive nature of truth and memory under oppression, with the “agent” representing anyone navigating hidden truths. Fueled by Brazilian movies from the 70’s, like Bruno Barreto’s Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976), where a poster can be seen outside the movie theater, also Carlos Diegues’ XICA (1976) and Bye Bye Brazil (Bye Bye Brasil) (1979), they were actually made during the military dictatorship, yet coming at a time when a new political openness began, a certain liberalization of the regime. Peppered with references to genre films, B-movies, 1970’s hits, and the very environment of movie theaters, the protagonist's father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is a projectionist at Cine São Luiz, the movie house of Recife, evoking a real character from PICTURES OF GHOSTS, though here it functions as a center of resistance. Shot on vintage camera equipment in Panavision ‘Scope by Russian-born, Paris-based cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova, this film partially came about by the seven-year research of documents and archives for his film PICTURES OF GHOSTS, using that process to advance the storyline for this film, featuring a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles, all living in the shadows, like ghosts of their own existence, as they are targets for elimination, their lives erased by the state, revealing a legacy of chaos, havoc, and the horrible stain political violence leaves in a nation’s memory. Never really knowing the type of danger he is in, only that he is being chased, what happens to the protagonist is left offscreen, only revealed secondhand near the end through a newspaper clipping.
After the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which authoritarian rhetoric and political repression became acceptable again, it recalls The Captive Mind (1953) by Czesław Miłosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, a blueprint for understanding totalitarianism, as it reveals the psychological toll from living under an authoritarian regime, transforming minds from within, literally losing one’s ability to think freely, making this film read like a silent commentary on the present. There’s also an indirect message on the decolonization of Angola, the second-largest Portuguese-speaking country after Brazil. A movie like this makes you appreciate the wonders of a working democracy, with a safeguard of protected freedoms built into the Constitution, allowing dissent as part of any healthy discussion, as democracy works best when diverse interests and multiple points of view are represented. When those protections are stripped away, the effect is immediate, as there’s a corrupt lawlessness that exists at every level of government bureaucracies, where protecting their own interests is all that matters, irrespective of any harm done to the populace. This film is like a road map into those troubling times, where the Brazilian military dictatorship lasted from 1964 to 1985 (Military dictatorship in Brazil: a history of violence), marked by state-sanctioned repression, censorship, and an artificial economic transformation, this 21-year authoritarian regime began with a U.S. CIA-backed military coup as a defense against erroneously perceived communist threats. The regime swiftly granted unchecked power to dissolve political parties, censor the media, and arrest dissenters as they suspended habeas corpus, shut down Congress, and legalized torture. Following a lead character, Armando (Brazilian actor Wagner Moura in his first Portuguese-language role in years), though most of the film we know him under his alias Marcelo, we watch him as he drifts through various layers of unleashed terror, recalling Kafka’s everyman character of Josef K in The Trial, who is arrested without reason for an unspecified crime, left in a no man’s land of suspicion and distrust, where the prevailing mood of absurdity is everywhere, as no one seems willing to actually identify what crime he may have committed, obscured by a vast, secretive, and inaccessible legal system, but the full weight of the law is thrown at him, suggesting he must be guilty. At some point in time, plagued by guilt, Josef K begins to believe it himself. Armando navigates his way through a similar labyrinthian network of bureaucratic traps, returning to his hometown of Recife during the 1977 Brazilian Carnival, described as “a time of mischief,” with nearly 100 deaths reported during the weeklong festivities, as in this chaos he hopes to reconnect with his five-year old son, Fernando, and escape the whirlwind of accusations. Stephen Spielberg’s JAWS (1975) was in the theaters at the time, where just the poster alone scared the living daylights out of Fernando, nonetheless, he couldn’t wait to see it. Entrusting his young son with his in-laws, he goes into hiding with a community of dissidents the government would like to make disappear, only to discover Recife is not the safe place he presumed it would be, suddenly finding himself fending for his life, where standouts include Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana, the elderly landlady harboring them, and Robério Diógenes as Euclides, a brutal police officer. The narrative seems meandering and circuitous, with many forks in the road, making it almost impossible to ascertain just what’s relevant and what isn’t, which is like sifting through the strands of history trying to uncover what ultimately matters.
The uncomfortable dialogue with the past and the present recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) in how it recreates a city at a particular moment in history, where the present remains haunted by memories, as the movie itself represents an act of resistance, accentuating the importance of the role media plays in standing up to authoritarianism, while it’s also notable for being the last appearance of German actor Udo Kier, who died recently just before Thanksgiving, playing a Jewish Holocaust survivor who is ridiculed by Euclides insisting that he must be a Nazi fugitive. Told in three chapter headings, it has a novelesque sweep about it, meandering through an obstacle course of diverging storylines, occasionally getting sidetracked with what seems like dead ends, much of it feeling uneven, with sequences that go nowhere, yet at heart this is about the banalization of violence. At more than two and one-half hours, it proceeds at a leisurely pace, slowly introducing a multitude of characters, becoming an ode to the Brazilian cinema of the filmmaker’s youth, never feeling rushed, and never in a hurry to fill in the missing pieces of a backstory, which only fuels the mounting tension, even managing to blend fantasy and black humor into this visually subversive political thriller, where bright, saturated colors act as a counterpoint to the dark, terrifying subject matter. Several times we see the portrait of dictator General Ernesto Geisel, which hangs in the offices of the official bureaucratic authorities, yet outside of those photos, there is no talk directly of the dictatorship. Instead there is an atmosphere of tension and authoritarianism that is established in the initial sequence, where a corpse is laying on the ground at a gas station, an apparent homage to Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), supposedly an anonymous man who tried to rob the establishment days earlier, but no one claims it, while also completely ignored by authorities, indicative of summary executions and the indifference of police power, making it clear that fear contaminates everything, and that this is a regime that weaponizes fear. By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the viewer, the filmmaker dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end, but at best, it remains ambiguous, hidden under a plethora of clues that spill out, making it increasingly clear that Armando is the subject of foul play, as behind-the-scenes fascist interests have targeted him for execution. Only in a flashback sequence do we understand that Armando was an engineer and college research academic with his wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), living comfortably in a university setting, when his research is abruptly stolen and the patent rights taken over by the ruthless actions of private industry, which sees dollar signs in profits, making them both expendable, which is made clear in no uncertain terms, eventually targeting his outspoken wife, who dies under mysterious circumstances that may never be known (telling his son she died of pneumonia), making him next. The entire film plays out on his increasingly paranoid wavelength, acutely aware of his frame of mind, where the beauty of the film is that it deals with surfaces that can be seen, while hiding the real motivations lurking underneath, where corrupt cops, paid informants, and notorious hitmen are on the trail, with what’s seen and unseen on a collision course with destiny, accentuated by newspaper reports that are infuriatingly inaccurate, printing misleading information fed by authorities, anything to take the heat away from the real murderous culprits.
Outside of Héctor Babenco’s THE KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (1985), Brazil has been late in dealing with this ugly part of their history. Apparently part of the population is still unaware of or has fallen under a collective spell of Bolsonaro-induced societal amnesia from this period of Brazilian history, where this film works as an antidotal corrective. Argentina, on the other hand, became renown for writing intelligent scripts exploring their dark past in the Dirty War (1976-1983), making films like THE OFFICIAL STORY (1985), THE MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO (1985), NIGHT OF THE PENCILS (1986), and CHRONICLE OF AN ESCAPE (2006), a time when 30,000 leftist sympathizers disappeared, taken to clandestine detention centers where they were tortured and killed before being dumped out of airplanes, dead or alive, over the Atlantic Ocean. Expressing a fascination with the Brazilian cultural identity, this is a dense and ambitious work, written by Mendonça, which is not so much about the story itself, but creating an atmospheric environment of surveillance and paranoia, addressing the years of the Brazilian dictatorship with a personal, fragmented gaze, populated by a mosaic of interesting secondary figures, including friends, collaborators, former guerrillas, degraded soldiers, and corrupt bureaucrats. There is no doubt that this is entertaining, filled with an underlying level of tension and suspense that drives the action, coming right after Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles won an Oscar for the Best International Feature with I’M STILL HERE (2024), the highest grossing Brazilian film since the pandemic, which dealt with the arrest and forced disappearance of a woman’s husband during this same military dictatorship, but this film goes off on a bunch of unnecessary tangents that seemingly go nowhere, perhaps adding to the speculation about how difficult it is to read between the lines of history, where much of the planted archival material is misinformation, making it hard to ascertain what really happened. Imperceptively jumping ahead to the present, there’s a lengthy sequence near the end of modern day university student researchers scouring the secretly recorded material of the times in search of unraveling the truth, including Flávia (Laura Lufési) who fixates on Marcelo’s audio tapes, as the story advances, halts, gets sidetracked, and discovers new revelations much as she unearths these new details, but it’s unclear who they are working for, what their aims may be, and who is funding their research. There are a lot of assumptions in this film, with nothing ever spelled out, leaving giant gaps in the story, where it’s easy to speculate and come up with our own theories, but the emphasis is not on exactly what happened, rather why it was covered up, and what this means in our current political landscape where authorities are doing exactly the same thing, using the highest echelons of power to obscure the truth, erase history, while feeding incessant lies to the media, making it almost impossible to ever know what is really going on. This lack of transparency is at the heart of every authoritarian government, using all available technological advantages to obstruct the truth, making a science of cover-ups and obfuscation, continually misleading the public until all that’s left are the layer of lies which are meant to protect the powerful forces behind the scenes, most of whom we will never really know, or just what crimes they got away with. Never really delving under the surface at the root cause of any of this, Mendonça’s film unearths the blueprint for how it gets done, revealing the extent of the infiltration in every branch of governmental authority, and the murderous lengths they are willing to go to protect the private financial interests of wealthy Brazilian business elites, as they are literally stealing massive funds from an unsuspecting public that hasn’t the means to protect themselves from this kind of insidious criminal operation under the guise of government, leaving behind a legacy of trauma and inequality that persists today.
“I'm calling from the future. Fascism is still around.” An Internet meme on X by Carlos Aguilar
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