THE SECRET AGENT
Directed by: Kleber Mendonça Filho Starring: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Udo Kier Certificate: 15 Released: 20 February 2026Rating: 9/10
Last year Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here began as a rapturous love letter to the lost Rio of his youth. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent feels like that film’s lurid and unruly twin. Both films look back at Brazil’s “years of lead” military dictatorship through the wide eyes of the boys their directors once were. But where Salles’ film unfurled into a sombre survey of the long, dogged fight for justice, Mendonça Filho offers a more phantasmagorical ride through the past, via its B-movies, its pop songs, and its urban myths.
Set in Recife in the north east of Brazil in 1977, the film follows Marcelo (Wagner Moura, superbly hangdog in a variety of period hairstyles), a fugitive university researcher finding some kind of asylum in a city boarding house. He’s desperately trying to reconnect with his young son, and find one last record of his lost mother. But the city is intoxicated with carnival and cinema, infested with corrupt cops, gangsters and hitmen, half crazed by paranoia, political intrigue and fever dreams.
Fantasy spills very vividly into everyday life. The whole country’s obsession with Jaws (released in Brazil as Tubarão) becomes manifest when a shark is caught off the coast complete with a severed human leg in its belly. The leg becomes the film's most striking detail and takes on a life of its own as the “Perna Cabeluda” (“the hairy leg”), a hopping monster that stalks the city’s parks at night. While it sounds like a surreal flourish, it’s based on a genuine urban legend turned samizdat code: the Hairy Leg became a way for Recife journalists to report on police violence without alerting the censors.
Mendonça Filho films these sequences with grindhouse flair, but the whole film is a cineaste’s delight, centred around Recife’s grand Cinema São Luiz, where Marcelo’s father in law works as a projectionist, showing not just Jaws, but also The Omen, King Kong, Close Encounters and Belmondo in Le Magnifique (which obliquely provides the film’s title). The film is heady with allusion, but this isn’t the nerdy indulgence of a Tarantino, but rather a rich suggestion of the way that everyone, from the corrupt police chief to the would-be assassins, have their head filled with b-movie archetypes.
One Battle After Another is rightfully sweeping the board of the awards ceremonies, but in its own determined way, The Secret Agent might be the most authentically Pynchonian film of the year, reporting back from the nocturnal side of reality with nightmarish aplomb, devastating loss, and murderously black humour.
