THE SECRET AGENT (wri & dir by Kleber Mendonça Filho, w/ Wagner Moura, Brazil, 161mns, 2025)

THE SECRET AGENT is a movie told in ellipsis. A cinema meant to be "read between the lines". 

It's an incredible movie. Not exactly the one you think it will be.

It is a political thriller. One as unpredictable as life itself.

It is very Brazillian. And research might help to understand the unsaid or understated tensions key to the movie.

We follow Armando (a hypnotic Wagner Moura) who returns to Recife, Brazil as a political dissident, hiding under a pseudonym and working at an information bureau, to buy enough time to get his son and himself out of Brazil. Meanwhile, a Stepfather and Stepson team of hit men are hired by an industrialist named Ghirotti to kill Armando.

We don't get all this information at once. And in fact, the movie is a non-chronological jigsaw puzzle about story telling, history, memory, and lived experience itself. And maybe even cinema's role in supporting those critical elements of how we make sense of the world. 

When we're already fairly deep in the movie, which takes place in 1977, we're jolted by a jump to the present day of smart phones and laptops as two college researchers digitally archive recordings of Armando.

As the researchers listen to the cassette tapes, Armando himself, during an interview with the people helping him hide, gets his own chronology confused in telling the story of the start of the conflict with himself and Ghirotti. This kind of narrative game is also at the heart of the movie. 

Filmmaker Filho, who made 2019's wildly entertaining allegorical satirical BACARAU, is going for something layered and complex here.

Yet he also wants to deliver on genre expectations. But he wants to do it in an unforeseeable way.

Like BACARAU which is a "Most Dangerous Game" riff where the poor Brazillian country town folk turn the tables on rich entitled foreign "hunters", THE SECRET AGENT bubbles, boils, and roils with class anger.

Here, rich industrialists from the Brazilian south feel free to insult and steal from mixed race academics from the less developed north who have the temerity to demand respect.

The movie touches on so many themes-the patronizing superiority South Americans with European parents feel, police corruption, oligarchy. 

Yet Filho and his team do it in a very quirky way. The focus is on foregrounding the human. While the political inditements are front and center, they aren't hammered or spoon fed. They come in through the side door.

And the movie is peppered with moments of bracing surrealism. A two faced cat. A severed leg that attacks a local cruising spot. 

The movie also acts as a kind of counterpoint to recent cinema that views "alternate histories" as a corrective to the actual horrors that happened in real life. Whereas some movies want to prove the power of cinema lies in changing or re-writing history, THE SECRET AGENT wants to prove the power of cinema in its ability to record, interrogate, cinematically observe and thus PRESERVE what happened in real life.

Late in the movie, the son of a key character admits he has no memory of his parent. Yet the movie as a whole acts as the memory that son has lost. This may be Filho's cris de coeur.

That in ongoing times of mass national, industrial, and class corruption and violence and injustice, cinema can demand we remember, we wrestle with the very reality that terrifies all of us.

But cinema can do that through entertaining genre. And Filho makes sure his cinema entertains as well.

What more can you ask from a movie? What more should we demand of ourselves?

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club