MA 15+, 158 minutes
5 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
In the sugar-cane country of northeast Brazil, a young man driving a yellow VW Beetle pulls in at a petrol station. He has enough cash to cover the cost of some fuel but feels perturbed, to say the least, by the fly-blown body lying under a sheet of cardboard on the forecourt. Been there days, the jovial attendant says, shooing away some wild dogs, then hosing the car’s windscreen. It’s just a question of waiting for the highway patrol to come and take it away.
A police car arrives on cue, but the two officers are only really interested in how to line their pockets by extracting fines from the driver. Unfortunately for the officers, there is nothing out of order in the young man’s papers or with his vehicle. The best they can do is cadge the last of his cigarettes. The corpse, meanwhile, can wait.
A little further along the road, there are rowdy revellers celebrating carnivale. That’s unpleasant too. One of the figures, tall and wearing a wolfish red mask and shaggy fur suit, consolidates this atmos of dis-ease. It is a very effective start to this neo-noir thriller.
After these nerve-jangling episodes, Marcelo (real name Armando) resumes his journey to the seaside city of Recife. As a man on the run, a widower and father to a young son, political fugitive and expert in key technology, Wagner Moura is excellent in the multi-dimensional lead role. He has much on his mind, including securing a safe future by taking his son with him and leaving Brazil forever.
How he came to have a price on his head is skilfully revealed in this immersive political thriller
These early scenes in this immersive political thriller from Kleber Mendonca Filho, a sweeping panorama of life under a military dictatorship in his home country in the 1970s, are a potent vignette on the corruption and administrative chaos that was rife there at the time. It happens to be set in around the same period as another highly regarded recent film from Brazil, I’m Still Here by Walter Salles, based on the true story of a dissident politician and his family.
At the heart of both films is the search for a family member who has been ‘disappeared’, eliminated during the country’s military dictatorship for activities deemed counter to the junta’s interests. In scenes that bring us up to the present day, how Marcelo came to have a price on his head is slowly and skilfully revealed.
Under his alias, Marcelo gets work in the city’s identity card office, endeavouring to lie low. His young son has been living in Recife with his maternal grandparents ever since Marcelo’s wife’s untimely death. Father-in-law Sr Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is a projectionist at the local cinema, a set location for a significant number of scenes with important developments.
A ‘hairy leg’ is a grisly symbol in local folklore for police repression
Director Filho has woven the influence of mainstream Hollywood into his own work. Among many things, The Secret Agent is a homage to Hollywood in the 1970s. King Kong is screening at the cinema in Recife, women are possessed by the spirit after watching The Omen with Gregory Peck, and popcorn thrillers feature great white sharks.
Marcelo finds out his son has become obsessed with sharks. Not because of the ocean nearby, replete with sharks, but because the poster for the film Jaws gives him nightmares. Steven Spielberg’s film was enjoying a re-run at the cinema after the contents of a shark caught recently had included a human leg. The gruesome discovery is a perfect fit with local folklore, in which the ‘hairy leg’ is a grisly symbol of police repression with a twitching, kicking life of its own.
Other elements of US popular culture, like the music of Chicago, and Donna Summer, have woven their way into the narrative, clearly an ubiquitous presence. A poster of Marilyn Monroe watches from the walls as Marcelo/Armando is interviewed within the cinema complex by Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), the regional leader of political resistance who tapes their conversations.
So many people are forgotten in Brazil, says director Filho, whose mother was a historian. The Secret Agent is a fiction but a tribute to those disappeared during a brutal, turbulent authoritarian period in the largest country in South America. And not just there. The filmmaker has taken a stand, alongside Salles, for history to make space for those who were ‘disappeared’.
Published in The Canberra Times on 24 January 2026. Jane’s reviews are also published on Rotten Tomatoes