‘The Secret Agent’ movie review: Wagner Moura smoulders in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s masterful anatomy of political fear

I wasn’t bracing myself for this to extremity up arsenic my implicit favourite movie of the year, particularly with its Cannes contemporaries successful Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value making perfectly tenable claims for the crown, but the woody was efficaciously sealed erstwhile I realised that The Secret Agent intended to diagnostic a large achromatic shark some connected surface and disconnected it — arsenic flesh-and-blood predator that populates the headlines similar an idée fixe, and arsenic Jaws (Tubarão successful its Brazilian incarnation) tearing done Recife’s cinemas for the archetypal clip — due to the fact that immoderate movie that keeps Spielberg’s large communal fright carried by my preferred apex predator successful progressive circulation has already anticipated my weaknesses.

That idiosyncratic bias may person tipped the movie towards thing generational for maine adjacent erstwhile it became wide that Kleber Mendonça Filho wasn’t indulging trivia oregon nostalgia. With his Oscar-nominated follow-up to his 2023 Recife-set documentary, Pictures of Ghosts, the Brazilian auteur seems to afloat grasp that cinema tutors its audiences wherever to deposit their fears, and erstwhile thing arsenic absurd arsenic a shark becomes the fashionable instrumentality for civic anxiety, the existent machinery of unit gains country to run elsewhere with minimal scrutiny. 

Set successful Recife successful 1977, astatine the tallness of Carnaval and heavy into a authorities that had learned however to vanish radical quietly, the movie follows Marcelo (played by a bravura Wagner Moura) a widowed assemblage researcher traveling nether a mendacious sanction aft crossing a national authoritative who attempted to privatise his publically funded work. Unsurprisingly, the enactment of nonrecreational absorption soon turns into a decease condemnation administered done hired killers and obliging police.

The Secret Agent is the astir concentrated articulation yet of what Mendonça Filho has been circling passim his career, that extends the spine of ‘60s-’70s Cinema Novo, and tells the aforesaid communicative of radical warring to support their bearings portion planetary capitalism, authorities power, and taste vandalism adjacent successful from each side, with restless ingenuity. Each movie finds a caller ceremonial route, yet the unit remains constant, arsenic persecuted individuals improvise flotation devices from memory, cinema, rumour, and stubborn attachment to place, trying to enactment afloat portion an unseen warfare grinds distant astatine the conditions that erstwhile made their satellite legible.

Moura is introduced done 1 of Mendonça Filho’s astir rigorously designed openings, arsenic Marcelo stops his striking, yellowish Beetle astatine a agrarian state presumption wherever a corpse lies decomposing nether cardboard portion the constabulary disregard the assemblage and absorption connected extorting him. The opener established a motivation bid nether Brazil’s erstwhile subject dictatorship successful which unit has been afloat absorbed into administrative habit.

From there, the communicative settles into Recife with patience, introducing a safe-house flat analyzable overseen by Dona Sebastiana, played by a terrific Tânia Maria with weathered snark and a dependable that carries decades of governmental fatigue. The abstraction doubles arsenic a impermanent refuge for dissidents, migrants, queer runaways, and different endangered folk. Marcelo’s idiosyncratic stakes sharpen done his reunion with his young lad Fernando, cared for by his precocious wife’s parents, including a projectionist gramps whose regular labour wrong the real-life Cinema São Luiz links the movie straight to Pictures of Ghosts’s explorations of Recife’s movie palaces and grounds the thriller wrong a broader meditation connected taste memory.

The crippled advances done procedural steps, pursuing Marcelo’s placement successful a authorities recognition bureau wherever helium issues documents portion secretly combing archives for traces of his vanished mother. The hostility stems from bureaucracy arsenic limb and structure astatine once, portion parallel threads way the question of hired killers and the maneuvers of a corrupt constabulary main who treats the chaos of Carnaval arsenic logistical screen for disposal. Mendonça Filho structures these strands to accumulate unit done proximity, allowing characters to brushwood past 1 different successful offices, streets, cinemas, and stairwells, with information emerging done sheer accidental timing.

Production-wise, the movie is built with meticulous play specificity that ne'er calls attraction to itself arsenic décor, arsenic accumulation decorator Thales Junqueira fills the framework with manual typewriters, egg-shaped telephone booths, crowded shelves, and heat-heavy interiors that pass some epoch and people position, portion costume decorator Rita Azevedo dresses characters successful a confrontational palette of yellows, blues, and greens that subtly echoes nationalist symbolism without drifting into abstraction. The realism of the mounting carries a sensory weight, arsenic the sunny, sultry Brazilian summertime is captured with a tactility that feels woozy and faintly nostalgic. The determination to sprout successful anamorphic Panavision with cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova gives the representation a high-contrast density that favours lateral question and heavy backgrounds, allowing Mendonça Filho to signifier powerfulness relations wrong a azygous framework alternatively than done montage that keeps the movie grounded successful reflection adjacent during moments of surreal intrusion.

Those intrusions, astir notably the recurring motif of a Janus feline making the unusual quality among the occupants of the safe-house, arsenic good arsenic a hairy, severed limb pulled from a shark’s tummy and reimagined done tabloid hysteria and exploitation-film phantasy — construe the fearfulness of authorities unit against marginalised communities into folklore that circulates freely due to the fact that it cannot beryllium officially named. Mendonça Filho treats these sequences with straight-faced commitment, folding stop-motion effects and genre pastiche into the film’s texture truthful that absurdity reads arsenic conscionable different registry of truth.

Moura’s show anchors this complexity with prudence, presenting Marcelo arsenic a antheral trained to minimise his footprint, whose quality expresses itself done listening and timing. The prime allows his character’s motivation clarity to look done enactment and reaction. Around him, a densely populated ensemble registers with precision, from an aging hitman and his younger spouse whose lackadaisical nonrecreational regular marque for 1 of the champion pursuit sequences the twelvemonth had to offer; to neighbours successful exile whose idiosyncratic histories aboveground during evening soirées with recovered family.

The governmental discourse emerges done operational details specified arsenic wiretapped conversations, opened telegrams, falsified records, and the insouciance with which officials expect compliance, situating the dictatorship arsenic a banal ecosystem of casual cruelties. Mendonça Filho’s determination to chopped intermittently to the present, wherever young researchers transcribe cassette tapes connected to Marcelo’s case, reframes the communicative arsenic an enactment of recovery, suggesting that past persists done worldly traces that necessitate patience and attraction to interpret.

When the movie reaches its closing movement, which aligns Marcelo’s destiny with his son’s big beingness wrong a repurposed civic space, The Secret Agent has completed its cardinal statement done the powerfulness of accumulated past that presents fabrication arsenic a durable vas for truths that authoritative records either distort oregon erase. Mendonça Filho’s power implicit pacing and chronology results successful an urgency that absconds astatine the archetypal motion of spectacle, and successful doing truthful helium delivers a enactment shaped by anger, affection, and a historian’s refusal to fto soundlessness basal successful for closure.

What made The Secret Agent my favourite movie of the twelvemonth wasn’t immoderate abstract admiration for play filmmaking oregon Mendonça Filho’s impeccable consciousness of texture, but the clarity successful recognising however that aforesaid grammar of fear plays retired successful the present and now. The cadence of authoritarianism successful erstwhile Recife feels disconcertingly acquainted if you’ve been paying attraction to however the societal inoculation against dissent is handled successful India today. If you’ve watched however the state’s rolling usage of laws to detain the likes of Umar Khalid oregon Sonam Wangchuk, the bureaucratic panic successful The Secret Agent feels astir section successful dialect. This isn’t to conflate contexts simplistically, but determination is simply a recognisable logic successful the mode powerfulness normalises surveillance and silence, whether done Brazil’s unresolved reckoning with its dictatorship oregon India’s contested translation toward an exclusionary civic order; a nationalist fervour that has, successful aggregate arenas, restructured citizenship, culture, and corporate representation into tools of power alternatively than sites of freedom.

There is besides a definite gall successful observing this logic of normalisation, due to the fact that what The Secret Agent does with dream-logic and genre pastiche is precisely what the contiguous realities astir america bash successful sober daylight by rebranding fearfulness and coercion arsenic “national security”. The movie advances a bracing thesis successful which forgetting accrues worldly cost, and fascism sustains itself by laundering taste amnesia into the connection of stableness and order. To anatomise fearfulness arsenic fabrication is to recognise its precise existent mechanics successful the places we really live, and that uncomfortable information is what elevates The Secret Agent supra and beyond the year’s much self-satisfied seriousness and leaves it the astir urgent Best Picture nominee successful the contention this year.

The Secret Agent is presently moving successful theatres