The Secret Agent ★★★★

Released: 20 February 2026

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Starring: Wagner Moura

The Secret Agent is, at heart, a film that offers up a much-needed subversion to the kind of movie you’d typically expect to bear this title. Perhaps it’s unfair to make this assumption, but mainstream film and TV alike have soured such a plain-faced title so much that I’d usually expect some cliched drama with nothing to offer beyond its transparent mystery. At the same time, perhaps its deceptively straightforward heading has caught me right in its intended place of germane deceit.

A Brazilian film, written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. The Secret Agent is set in 1977 during the political turmoil of Brazil’s military dictatorship, as it follows Armando played by Wagner Moura in one of the finest performances of the year, a former professor and widower fleeing from a mysterious past and returning to the town of Recife in search of peace. He soon runs into trouble when former Eletrobas executive director Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) hires two hitmen to kill him.

The core of its subversions lies in its commitment to being patient. It isn’t doused in tacky action set pieces or disruptive tension-breaking, but rather an ability to build atmosphere through observation and conversation, whose riveting scenes of recollecting outpouring don’t feel weighed down in needless exposition. Every petrol station, every street, every housing complex, all feel individually lived-in and worn down by its nation’s dire political complications, something that is efficiently communicated in the corruption of its opening scene; a faceless dead body covered up in a pathetic attempt by nothing more than a piece of cardboard, in plain sight of the authorities. A world defined by its obvious carelessness and the aged characters that inhabit it.

As we wade through its opening act, its title becomes even more intentionally masked by an inherent deception necessary to its characters, as we are never truly faced with the typical iconography you’d expect from a film titled The Secret Agent. Yes, our lead, Armando, is given a new alias, Marcelo, as he attempts to dig up parts of his family’s past through files, of which he has little memory, but its intentional artifice is the key to its lock. Being a “secret agent”, deprived of a stereotypical form, is the only way of succeeding in such a fascist dominated environment. Being yourself is not going to cut it.

As mentioned before, Armando uses his new duality to wade through files to try to find fleeting memories he once lost. In here lies the most thematically surprising part of the film. Early on as Armando arrives back in Recife, he immediately goes to see his young son, Fernando, a boy who is obsessed with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, despite not being allowed to see the film yet. Armando’s father is also a projectionist at a local cinema. The film toys repeatedly with the concept of memory, filtered through the lens of pop culture decomposition. One of the film’s key scenes takes place in that cinema where our lead gives a testimony on Henrique Ghirotti’s corrupt activities. An outpouring of memory in the place that constantly replays images of the past, but Kleber creates this antithesis between current perception and misleading recollection through film. Jaws is used as a staple point of factual memory, a focal point where everything surrounding it is now a haze of remembrance, your own memories are lying to you, but Fernado finally seeing that film with his Grandfather is the only authentic bit of consciousness he has left. In pop culture, what deserves to occupy such feelings? The buildings that housed those images or the mind that took them over? The Secret Agent’s premeditated deception is built on the foundation of memory’s natural decomposition. The way Kleber Mendonça Filho permeates this through film isn’t sleazy nostalgia but instead a glance into the way it is activated within us, and the perils it filters out. The buildings that those memories used to inhabit are now faded into modernity.

This film dedicates its runtime to trying to find meaning in who Armando is; there are brief segments, now and again, of girls in the present, listening to archives of the conversation happening parallel to the film, as they attempt to discover with us who he was, but Kleber’s potent ambiguities still prevail.