‘The Secret Agent’ review: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 1970s Brazilian thriller is ‘riot of a movie’

Dir/scr: Kleber Mendonça Filho. Brazil/France/Germany/Netherlands. 2025. 160mins

Brazil, 1977. A left-leaning educational and know-how professional flees a robust enemy, returning to the place of his start – the state of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil – below the assumed title of Marcelo (Wagner Moura). He’s hoping to flee together with his younger son, however the metropolis of Recife is even wilder than regular, the carnival is in full swing, the physique depend is mounting and the sharks (each literal and metaphorical) are circling. The fourth fiction function from Kleber Mendonça Filho is a sweat-saturated riot of a film: a dual-timeline thriller powered by the type of anarchic, erratic vitality that you’d anticipate finding on the finish of a two day bender.

A sweat-saturated riot of a film

Unfolding largely within the late seventies, it’s set barely later than Walter Salles’ I’m Nonetheless Right here however shares the rumbling backdrop of the navy dictatorship. It’s a interval of ’nice mischief’, based on a gap title. Mischief appears one thing of an understatement for a wildly pleasing movie which begins with a corpse on the sidewalk and clocks up a lot extra by the tip. However ‘mischief’ is a well-chosen phrase, capturing the agile wit of Mendonça Filho’s strategy to the movie. Tonally, The Secret Agent is an sudden mix of the bloody gusto of Bacurau and the extra considerate strategy of the director’s most up-to-date image, the documentary Photos Of Ghosts, with its fascination with archives, oral histories and the cinemas that after stood within the cities and cities of Brazil.

The movie takes time piecing collectively Marcelo’s story and the character of the risk to his security. However he’s an instantly likeable character, a person who refuses to hold a gun however who’s armed with appreciable attraction. After he negotiates the jackals of the native police and cavorting carnival monsters, his arrival in Recife appears like a homecoming.

Marcelo is welcomed right into a covert neighborhood of refugees (though they like to not use that phrase) from elsewhere in Brazil and additional afield: there’s a pair from Angola. It’s a household of kinds, presided over by 77-year-old den mom Dona Sebastiana. However the presence within the condo block of a ‘Janus cat’, a feline congenital deformity which implies that the animal is born with two faces, is maybe a touch that not the whole lot within the metropolis will be trusted.

Marcelo takes non permanent work in an official Identification Data Workplace, partly as cowl and partly to hunt out a file of his mom’s life. One of many themes that the movie explores is the best way during which wealth and privilege disproportionately impacts on an individual’s historic legacy – some lives depart a considerable mark and  others are erased; some voices are heard and others are silenced.

On the workplace, Marcelo has the doubtful honour of being taken below the wing of the native police chief, Euclides (Roberio Diogenes). That Euclides is corrupt goes with out saying – he is aware of reasonably greater than he’s letting on a few human leg which has been discovered within the stomach of a shark. However he takes a liking to Marcelo, hauling him off throughout his lunch break to fulfill German exile Hans (Udo Kier), to admire his assortment of bullet scars. It’s an odd scene, and one which doesn’t add a lot to the image other than an nervousness spike within the constructing rigidity.

Woven into the movie are a number of modern segments, together with a barely underpowered closing coda. We meet a younger educational researcher (Laura Lufesi) who’s transcribing C90 cassette recordings of interviews from the late 70s, together with some which clarify Marcelo’s predicament. She turns into fascinated by his story and his destiny.

The usage of the cassette tapes is only one aspect that contributes to the richly textured sense of time and place. Mendonça Filho shot the image, like Bacurau, in anamorphic Panavision, and it seems to be terrific. The colors are swimming and saturated; the sunshine has a evenly beach-bronzed high quality. Music is a pulsing mash-up of Brazilian carnival stompers and some American tracks. And the overheated city legends of the time – allegories for the oppressive regime – are dropped at life in a gloriously odd sequence during which a disembodied zombie leg terrorises the locals in a late-night hook-up park.