150 Word Review: 'The Secret Agent' (2025)
Father figure
The main character is Wagner Moura, a widower and former professor who returns to his hometown with a plan: to flee a dictatorship with his son. But the other main character in director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sprawling, Portuguese-language thriller The Secret Agent is Brazil in 1977, a country sick with corruption and violence. The movie opens on a corpse left to rot and ends on a man whose childhood was stolen by the state.
Set during the carnival holiday, Moura’s dashing but exhausted character seeks the company of other political dissidents while plotting an escape. Shout-out to Tânia Maria as chainsmoking subversive Dona Sebastiana. The Secret Agent honors the spy genre’s beats: hitmen, shootouts, codenames. But this is a requiem. The mood is mournful. To watch a story about the innocent being preyed upon by the venal, as an American, is to ask: why do we think we’re so special?
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There's a really good interview with Wagner Moura in the NYT today. He said that the difference between Brazil and America is that Brazil swiftly convicted and jailed Bolsanaro because, unlike America, Brazillians knew a dictatorship when they saw one.
The closing observation about American exceptionalism cuts through perfectly. Framing Brazil in 1977 as a mirror rather than a relic shifts the whole reading. I've been thinking alot lately about how period pieces function less as history lessons and more as plausible deniability for critique that feels too raw when set in the present. The carnival backdrop is a really smart choice becaus it forces this juxtaposition between public celebration and private terror.