The Secret Agent (“O Agente Secreto”) ★★★1/2

Availability: Still showing in theaters (as part of Oscar nominee showings). For rent or purchase through Amazon Prime and AppleTV. See JustWatch here for full streaming availability.

A Time of “Mischief”

The first scene of “The Secret Agent” reveals more than a little of what’s ahead in Director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s smart, complex, existential, Oscar-nominated drama, set in the corrupt and violent Brazil of 1977, a country in the throes of a brutal dictatorship. After 3 days on the road, Marcelo (Wagner Moura) pulls into an isolated gas station, noticing a cardboard box covering a dead body, bloodied by a gunshot. Marcelo is tall, dark, and handsome; it seems clear he’s the “secret agent” of the title. When the police arrive, they’re more interested in him than the body. Cool and calm under the brief interrogation—more confirmation of his “real” identity—he escapes the shakedown with the loss of just a few cigarettes.

When a tall, dark, and handsome VW Beetle driver interests the police more than the dead body partially covered with cardboard, might the driver be the secret agent of the film title?

Except that Marcelo isn’t a secret agent—no 007, no martini shaken, not stirred, no Aston Martin DB5 (he’s driving a yellow VW Beetle). He isn’t even a cop, though a corrupt local chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes), insists he must be because he looks the part. Marcelo doesn’t carry a gun, and his bare-hands skills will remain untested. As we’ll learn later, Marcelo is a cover for Armando Solimões, a college professor and researcher, working in a small laboratory in the State of Pernambuco. Armando is the author of a patent on a lithium battery that may, or may not, be important to his perilous situation. He’s a “refugee,” in flight for a reason that is never fully explained, and he’s headed to the capital of Pernambuco, Recife, where he’ll live for a brief time in a communal apartment arrangement with other fearful refugees, all of it managed by the aged, feisty Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a woman with a communist-anarchist history she won’t talk about.

---

Marcelo isn’t a secret agent—no 007, no martini shaken, not stirred, no Aston Martin DB5 (he’s driving a yellow VW Beetle).

---

Not only is Marcelo/Armando not a secret agent, but there’s no “Dr. No,” no “Russia,” no non-state actor seeking world dominance, no knock on the door that changes everything, as in “I’m Still Here,” last year’s Oscar-winner set in the same period in Brazil. Yes, there’s plenty of corruption and violence—even an exciting chase scene, a bad guy chasing a bad guy, hit men suspicious of other hit men, and several murders­—symptoms rather than causes or explanations.

Marcelo (Wagner Moura) is deep into the document records

when he hears his real name uttered in the crowd behind him.

Armando’s situation appears to date from a 1974 dinner, presented here in flashback, a confrontation between, on the one hand, him and his strong-willed wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), and on the other, Eletrobras executive director Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) and his puerile son. Armando’s patent comes up, and may have a bearing on Ghirotti’s decision to close down the Pernambuco laboratory, but personal differences seem more noteworthy, especially Ghirotti’s disdain for Fátima, who speaks her mind in a way that offends him as a man (“control your woman”), just as remarks by Renee Good’s wife may have affected the ICE agent who killed Good. Fátima and Armando are equally offended by Ghirotti’s lack of respect—“you come here, you are our guest, and you’re acting like this?”

---

Mendonça Filho has a larger point to make: it’s pointless to ask “why?” Life is contingent, capricious, inexplicable, senseless, ultimately without purpose, one damn thing after another.

---

Although here and elsewhere in the film issues of respect and patriarchy are weighty and in one case motivate a killing, interpersonal relations, the way people talk to each other, hardly seems the critical hook on which to hang a narrative. Mendonça Filho has a larger point to make: it’s pointless to ask “why?” Life is contingent, capricious, inexplicable, senseless, ultimately without purpose, one damn thing after another. A woman we don’t know is shot through a sack, her weighted body dumped in the ocean. A man’s hairy leg—maybe that of another researcher, a missing agronomist—is found in the belly of a shark (the 1975 film “Jaws,” its shark a symbol of freakish unpredictability, is showing in Brazilian theaters). Fátima is a victim not of Ghirotti’s wrath, but of pneumonia. We’ll learn of Armando’s fate only through a newspaper article.

Marcelo (Moura, in green shirt, leaning forward) finds himself in a kind of communal living situation with other "refugees," and their helpers, including the attractive

Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido, in white blouse to his right).

The refugees gathered around Dona Sebastiana, who could collectively serve as a political touchstone, have little in common. Whatever Armando’s backstory—the patent, a feminist wife, a corporation shutting down competition, political ideology—is less important than the mere fact that he’s on the run, fearing for his life, a victim of a “time of mischief” (surely a reference steeped in irony). As Armando tells his fellow refugees—as if he had suddenly learned the lesson of life, and as if it could happen to anyone—“I discovered today that people are out to kill me.”

---

Mendonça Filho entertains the idea that one’s life might be better understood in retrospect, through documents, records, and memories.

---

Having distilled Marcelo/Armando’s existence into something over which he has no control and that has no obvious meaning, Mendonça Filho entertains the idea that one’s life might be better understood in retrospect, through documents, records, and memories. One can view the story as about the myriad ways we attempt to know: information in bits and pieces, storytelling, lying, distancing, use of research, archives, documents.

The fractured narrative comes to the fore in the film’s final third. Two young women in an imprecise present listen to and discuss tapes made in 1974, when Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), an attractive woman in the resistance movement, was in a short-lived tryst with the newly arrived Marcelo, and when that fateful dinner with Ghirotti took place. The tapes allow a different kind of storytelling, and they offer distance from the events and a temptation to rethink what happened. But when Flávia (Laura Lufési), one of the researchers, meets with Armando’s son, Fernando (played by Moura), who—30-plus years later—is a middle-aged physician, Fernando seems uninterested in what Flávia has learned and claims to remember, and to want to remember, little of his father (“you [Flávia] know more than I do.”). The story also deals with Armando’s efforts, while working at the Identification Institute, a records facility, to locate evidence that would shed light on his mother’s life. Poignantly, he finds none.

Unlike last year's Oscar-winner “I’m Still Here,” with its intense, focused, personal story of the widow of a “disappeared” former exiled politician, Mendonça Filho’s film proffers a variety of frameworks, including corruption, none of which is dominant. He plays with the outsider, including a Holocaust survivor (a last role for Udo Kier), the setting of Carnival (barely controlled chaos, anything can happen), a mass hysteria response to political dysfunction (the attack of the hairy leg), as well as class (which he examined as co-writer and co-director of the excellent 2019 “Bacurau”) and patriarchy.

---

At its core it’s a meditation—and a rather pessimistic one at that.

---

Despite its unlikely, “nice guy” protagonist (Moura is nominated for a Best Actor Oscar), “The Secret Agent” is a well-told story, one that manages to generate moments of tension, a certain humor of the absurd (follow the hairy leg), and maybe even enough excitement to keep the teens in their seats. At its core it’s a meditation—and a rather pessimistic one at that—on how one might begin to understand the meaning, or lack thereof, of one’s life.

---

He says: A lot more interesting than watching Leonardo DiCaprio run around in a bathrobe.

She says: I liked DiCaprio in the bathrobe.

---

Date: 2025 (released in US in 2026)

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Starring: Wagner Moura, Robério Diógenes, Tânia Maria, Alice Carvalho, Luciano Chirolli, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Laura Lufési, Udo Kier

Country: Brazil

Language: Portuguese and some German, both subtitled in English, and some English

Runtime: 161 minutes

Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture, Best Actor, Best International Feature Film, Best Casting

Other Awards: 76 wins (including 4 at Cannes) and 145 other nominations