“The Secret Agent” (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
Mubi has been reaping the rewards — and the awards — of its Cannes 2025 buying spree for the better part of a year now, but subscribers to the company’s streaming service are about to have them all dumped into their laps at once. “My Father’s Shadow,” “Sound of Falling,” and especially Julia Loktev’s monumental documentary “My Undesirable Friends” could each justify the montly subscription cost on their own, to say nothing of the Christian Petzold retrospective and a bite at last year’s under-the-radar animated delight, “Endless Cookie.” But you gotta give the people what they want, and it turns out the people really, really want knotty, 160-minute historical thrillers about the assault on Brazil’s collective memory, especially if they feature a lot of Wagner Moura standing around and looking sweaty. A word on “The Secret Agent”:
In his 2023 essay film “Pictures of Ghosts,” a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife’s once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that “Fiction films are the best documentaries.” If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto.
The focused but sprawling story of a wanted man named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) who travels to Recife in the hopes of collecting his son and escaping the country, the director’s 1977-set period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the “Brazilian Miracle” that marked the height of the country’s military dictatorship. Far from the high-octane spy picture that might be suggested by its title (a title that’s easy to imagine written in giant letters across the marquee of Recife’s São Luiz Cinema), “The Secret Agent” only bumps into espionage tropes as if by accident, and its protagonist seems to be as confused by them as we are. On the contrary, Mendonça’s movie operates at the pace and tenor of a drama in exile, albeit one that’s fringed with B-movie fun and stalked by a pair of unscrupulous hitmen.
“The Secret Agent” is ultimately a tale of “mischief” more than anything else. That’s the word Mendonça uses to identify the time period in the film’s opening title card, and it accurately sets the scene for a story less rooted in the terror of Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” than in the wistful barbarity of Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” The joy it takes in exhuming a semi-erased time allows Mendonça to argue that movies can manufacture a meaningful history of their own — one powerful enough to cut through the erosion of truth, and the official record of a country that might be too ashamed of its own reflection to honestly look itself in the mirror. With “The Secret Agent,” Mendonça exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.
Available to stream April 17.
Other highlights:
– “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow” (4/3)
– “My Father’s Shadow” (4/10)
– “Sound of Falling” (4/24)