Bryan Miller
Brazil crime cinema is on a heater lately, producing two of the best underworld movies from any country to hit American theaters in 2024 — first Carnival Is Over, and now Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, which is one of 2025’s best films, irrespective of genre.
The movie is as cautious with information as its protagonist, Marcelo (Wagner Moura), who we meet in an incredible opening sequence that foreshadows the movie’s deliberate pace and slow-burn menace. Marcelo’s yellow Volkswagen bug tips us off to the 1970s setting. It’s almost entirely out of gas when he steers it into a gas station where a fly-blown corpse lays a few dozen yards away, dirty bare feet sticking out from beneath a slab of cardboard that has been laid over it, weighted down with two rocks.
The ingratiating gas station attendant waves it away — just a would-be thief another employee shot, but because it’s Carnival the police haven’t responded for days. But you’re a customer, he insists to Marcelo, it’s none of your concern.
Just then a police car pulls into the station, but the cops are less interested in the dead body than in trying to shake down Marcelo, searching through his car to gin up a reason to take a bribe…or perhaps worse. It’s a theme that will recur throughout The Secret Agent: Death is never too far away, neither in remote locales nor amidst ecstatic celebration, and danger could come from any direction amidst the corruption of the waning military dictatorship. Such is life in Recife, the capital city of the state of Pernambuco, on the northeast coast of Brazil.
Marcelo makes his way into Recife proper, where he is sheltered by Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria), a wily chain-smoker whose apartment complex is a safe house for refugees and the politically persecuted. Marcelo takes a job with the local government records office, but he appears to have an ulterior purpose there.
While at the office, he crosses paths with the corrupt chief of police, Euclides (Roberio Diogenes), who is dealing with the peculiar case of a human leg found inside the belly of a shark. Euclides’ problem isn’t finding out who the leg belonged to, but rather that he knows exactly who, because he was responsible for dumping the corpse in the water. Unbeknownst to Euclides, the hired killers he’s friendly with are in town searching for Marcelo, who is revealed to be a widower living under an assumed name, racing to complete a mysterious mission so he can flee with his young son, who currently lives with Marcelo’s father (Carlos Francisco), a film projectionist.
Writer-director Filho’s richly detailed recreation of Recife in the late 1970s and the complex entanglement of stories threaded with very real political circumstances of the time are contrasted with moments of lavish surrealism. The defining image of the movie is the bloated, black foot of a corpse jutting from the leaking belly of a tiger shark, all piled atop a table in a school research lab.
The fate of the leg is one of the key concerns of the film, and provides a darkly comedic through-line that merges cinematic reference, metaphor, and local folklore. Sharks and legs abound. Marcelo’s son is beset by nightmares about sharks, and he compulsively draws his own recreations of the movie poster for Jaws, which his grandfather is currently screening. One among the many famous shots in Jaws is the gory flourish of a long leg, severed at the hip socket, drifting down onto the ocean floor. It looks an awful lot like the troublesome leg found in the belly of the shark, which, in The Secret Agent’s most floridly surreal sequence, gets up and begins hopping around by itself, kicking gay men cruising in a public park — or is that just the knowingly absurd tale plied by the newspapers, which are also complicit in obscuring the truth behind bodies, and body parts, turning up around town? It’s a reference to the real, or at least “real” urban legend of Perna Cabeluda, the “Hairy Leg” of Recife, which is a popular bit of local folklore and a kind of half-joking unofficial mascot of the city.
All of this is fascinating, but you needn’t be familiar with all of it to enjoy the multi-layered storytelling of The Secret Agent. As Marcelo’s background and current mission becomes increasingly clear near the midpoint of the film, the central plot is both entirely comprehendible and quite surprising, given the title. It invites you to ponder exactly who is the secret agent in question, and along the way Filho also paints a vivid portrait of people leading secret lives of resistance amid turbulent, often conflicting local and national politics.
The ensemble performances are uniformly excellent, but the movie is anchored by a spectacular turn from Moura, who has one of the most intense, soulful faces in cinema today. He plays silence like an instrument, to virtuoso effect, while also keeping a potentially heady movie tethered to reality. The Secret Agent continues to surprise at it zigzags toward a conclusion that’s both inevitable and unexpected, with a powerful coda that completes a story whose loose ends, quite essentially, can never fully be tied together.
Wonderful review of an incredible movie. I will shout out all of the amazing supporting performances since Moura–rightfully so–is getting all the attention for this. And what a way for the great Udo Kier to go out, so to speak.