At a gas station in the middle of rural Brazil, Marcelo (Wagner Moura) pulls in to fill up the tank of his yellow beetle before he spots a body covered with cardboard in the middle of the lot. It has been there for almost a week and the parking attendant has been shooing away stray dogs eager to chew at the decomposing limbs as he waits for the police to respond to his call.

They’re certainly busy, though, as it is Carnival and the cities of Brazil are wrapped up in celebration, which the government can conveniently use to commit its own crimes. Much talk is made of the 90-something deaths and disappearances that have already occurred during the annual holiday, with one cop remarking that he expects this count to rise past 100.

It is under the cover of Carnival that Marcelo is trying to flee Brazil with his young son Fernando in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s terrifically transportive political thriller The Secret Agent

. By immersing us in 1977 Recife — with all its sun-drenched streets and a sense of deep-seated paranoia — Filho crafts a film that is as equally absurd as it is affecting. Despite the film’s тιтle, though, The Secret Agent isn’t your typical espionage thriller, but it’s all the better for how it plays with genre, tone, and expectations.

Wager Moura Stuns In The Secret Agent

The Film Is As Deceptive & Slippery As Its тιтle

On its surface, The Secret Agent is about a man on the run, but Filho is also interested in how common this situation is under Brazil’s military dictatorship. This political unrest was also depicted in last year’s Walter Salles pic I’m Still Here, a stately drama that went on to win Best International Feature at the 2025 Oscars.

The Secret Agent defies genre, though, blending thrilling set pieces with meditations on memory and family and some surrealist elements to show the psychic and bodily impacts of such a regime. One thing the two films do have in common is their movement through time. Filho introduces us to two university archivists who are listening to recordings of conversations Marcelo had during his time in Recife, a subplot that will prove integral to the film’s latter half.

These scenes bookend an idiosyncratic journey through the sun-soaked streets of the Brazilian city where its residents celebrate Carnival during a time of deep political turmoil. Though the film often bucks against the tension its тιтle implies will be present, there’s still an overarching feeling of unease and paranoia, even in The Secret Agent‘s sweetest moments, like when Marcelo finally reunites with his young son, Fernando, who is staying with his mother’s parents after she pᴀssed from pneumonia.

Ultimately, family is really at the heart of this film; communities, like the one in the apartment complex Marcelo takes refuge in, form in the face of authoritarianism. Overseen by an elderly manager, Dona Sebastiana, a family forms between the people she is giving safe harbor to, as many are in hiding in Recife, awaiting their turn to escape persecution. This kind of family is juxtaposed against the father-son relationships Filho is clearly fixated on. In addition to Fernando and Marcelo, there are a pair of ᴀssᴀssins and a group of dirty cops, which call back to this dynamic.

As Marcelo’s motives reveal themselves, he’s not necessarily looking to outrun his past as much as he’s searching for it, as if he needs to know what he’s running away from before he leaves. A woman named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) has secured Marcelo a job at an identification services office, where Marcelo hopes to find evidence of his mother’s existence in the form of old files. It’s unclear what happened to her. She obviously existed, but his desperation to confirm this may contribute to his downfall.

There’s a lot going on in The Secret Agent, but Filho deftly handles each disparate element, weaving it all together into one elegant story. His love for Brazil and cinema is palpable. A recurring image is that of a shark, whether it’s his son’s desire to see the film Jaws in theaters or the disembodied leg found in the bowels of one off the coast. To reveal much more about that leg or The Secret Agent in general would give away some of the film’s magic.

Though it hides in plain sight and through the lens of a conventional thriller at first, Filho peels away the layers of his film to reveal something altogether mesmerizing and devastating.

The Secret Agent premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.