Released in theaters late November and on streaming services earlier this week, “The Secret Agent” is a gripping political thriller that doubles as an unflinching meditation on life under military dictatorship. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and set in 1979 during the bloody Brazilian military dictatorship, the Portuguese-language film — with English subtitles — fuses paranoia and memory to present a story that often feels closer to horror than history.
The film has earned widespread acclaim, including four Academy Award nominations — for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best International Feature Film and Best Casting — and major wins at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe Awards.
The film follows the life of Marcelo Alves (Wagner Moura), a former professor whose real name is Armando Solimões. After the death of his wife, Marcelo goes undercover and heads for a safe house in Recife, where the film was shot on location. Set against the fantastical backdrop of Brazil’s annual carnival, the narrative blurs reality and recollection, building a layered portrait of intellectual life under authoritarian rule. Even within the first 20 minutes of the 161 minute film, viewers are confronted with a gripping, albeit utterly devastating, watch.
While most of the story unfolds in the late 1970s, the film intermittently flashes forward to the 21st century to follow Flávia (Laura Lufési), a university student in Brazil, as she listens to recordings of Marcelo’s interviews. Her handling of newspaper clippings and cassette tapes gives the film an archival feel. The way in which the movie looks back upon the time of dictatorship through this modern element seems to allude to the possibility of political change.
The film handles violence in a sophisticated but poignant way. The graphic nature of much of the violence is chilling, particularly during a shoot-off when viewers see a man’s cheek nearly detach from his face.
The performances elevate what is already a formidable script. Moura captures Marcelo’s restrained terror and intellectual defiance with remarkable control, embodying the fragility of education in moments of political upheaval. Each actor helps paint a picture of authoritarianism, showing that the military dictatorship impacted every single facet of society and every person in it, regardless of their identities.
One of the film’s most illuminating sequences occurs when Marcelo and his fellow academics show businessman Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) around their technology lab. Ghirotti is immediately drawn to the machines with commercial potential, threatening to withdraw funding when the professors resist his efforts to co-opt their work for his own profit. In response, Marcelo patents one of his own inventions, a decision that could cost him his life. The confrontation crystallizes the abuse of the regime. Even publicly funded universities, the film suggests, had no choice but to succumb to the whims of the wealthy.
The world of “The Secret Agent” feels alarmingly tangible. Not only because the movie was filmed on location in Recife, but because the tension between government and institutions of higher education reverberates in the present day. Watching the film amid contemporary threats of funding revocation at American universities lends it an added urgency.
Talia LeVine is a section editor covering arts and culture. They study Political Science and Visual Art with a focus on photography. In their free time, they can be found drinking copious amounts of coffee.
