“If I leave, I will lose my job. If I stay, I will be left with decomposing flesh. I have almost gotten used to this crap,” Frentista (Joálisson Cunha) in “The Secret Agent.”
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2025 film “The Secret Agent,” known in the original Portuguese as “O Agente Secreto,” has been nominated for four Academy Awards at the 98th Oscar ceremony, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), Best International Feature Film and Achievement in Casting. It also won Best Non-English Language Film at the 83rd Golden Globes and is primarily released with English subtitles for international audiences. Amid the backdrop of the festive Carnival holiday, widower and former scientist Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) escapes to the coastal city of Recife in 1977 Brazil to hide from political persecution while looking to reunite with his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes).
Moura is the first Brazilian nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor and became the first Brazilian actor to win a Golden Globe for Best Actor (Drama) in 2026.
Coming in at a lengthy two hours and 40 minutes, “The Secret Agent” is a three-part historical thriller that takes a meandering look back into Brazil’s past under dictatorship. While the film primarily focuses on Armando’s point of view, it also includes many perspectives from characters such as his son and their mundane lives in a nonlinear narrative.
Written and directed by Filho, the movie quickly establishes its cynical and casually violent tone in the opening scene: a corpse surrounded by flies, hastily covered with cardboard and left to rot for days. The culprit? Gone. And the police? Too busy extorting Armando for cash at a gas pump.
Over the course of the movie, Armando is forced to act like a secret agent to survive persecution — living under multiple aliases, hiding from hired killers and residing in a safe house with other political dissidents. Rife with symbolism and historical allusions, “The Secret Agent” doesn’t pause to explain. Instead, viewers are yanked from scene to scene to puzzle out information on their own. For example, interspersed within the mundane and violent scenes in the movie, the camera pivots up to zoom in on an unnamed portrait — that of then-president Ernesto Geisel. “The Secret Agent” captures the dictatorship as a looming influence that shapes localized, smaller powers which in turn oppress people in their daily lives.
Meanwhile, corrupt police chief Euclides Kavalkancis (Robério Diógenes) and his sons investigate a mysterious leg discovered in a tiger shark stomach. At the same time, corrupt and influential former government minister and Eletrobras executive Henrique Castro Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) hires hitman Augusto (Roney Villela) and his son Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) to pursue Armando as a result of a personal vendetta.
Through clever cuts and lighting techniques, the movie uses resistance leader Elza’s (Maria Fernanda Cândido) audio tapes as a vehicle to seamlessly shift from the past, the present, and the future all at once. In the present day, history student Flavia (Laura Lufési) listens to these tapes and unravels the mystery of Armando’s fate as he reveals his past to Elza. Flavia is lit by cool white light in a clean office. Armando, however, lives in a world of warm sepia tones while his memories have a hazy dreamlike tone. During the dictatorship, thousands were disappeared and their fate remains unknown. “The Secret Agent” grapples with the nature of their missing memories and fills in these blanks left behind.
While the film offers a densely rich world and intricate plot threads, it an be hard for a casual audience to follow without context from Brazilian history and culture as it features complex underground resistance networks, an established corrupt police system that favors the wealthy and economic power struggles between north and south Brazil. Furthermore, the film takes a long time to establish it’s characters before a comparatively short and action-filled third act. Its long length and many detours can feel directionless, but this remains a poignant film that needs to be watched more than once to truly digest.
“The Secret Agent”
Historical/Political Thriller
2 hours 40 minutes
Rated R
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring: Wagner Moura
