Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent may have been smuggled into American cinemas late last year but it really had its cover blown this winter when it triggered considerable awards attention. At the Golden Globes it won Best Actor — Drama and Best Foreign Language Film and became the first Brazilian film to be nominated for Best Picture — Drama. At the 98th Academy Awards (which, by the way, have you started to think about how insufferable the 100th Oscars are going to be?) it earned four nominations, although it didn’t win any. While it may seem like a coup, once you see it, you can’t notice it has many of the hallmarks of the kinds of movies the Academy adores in the 21st Century – especially, and unfortunately, fellow 2025 critical darling One Battle After Another (with a tasteful splash of No Country For Old Men).
In what may go down as an all-timer tone-setting opener, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle pulls into a rural gas station and stops just short of a dead body covered in rocks and cardboard. He was shot days ago and had it coming, the proprietor explains, and the police haven’t come yet due to the carnival holiday. This is Brazil in 1977, smack dab in the middle of military dictatorship. The mysterious driver, Armando (Wagner Moura), is on his way to northeastern city Recife, where he has two missions: reunite with his young son and look for clues about his mother. But as we’ll soon find out, Armando should really be worried about the people looking for him.
Armando takes refuge in a secret political refugee hideout operated by his mother-in-law (I think? I wasn’t 100% certain), 77-year-old anarcho-communist Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria, the real star of the movie). He soon gets a chance to spend time with his boy before beginning his investigation and getting to know his fellow dissidents. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, a mysterious, but obviously shitty dude named Henrique Castro Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) hires two hitmen, Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) to murder Armando — and he has no qualms making it clear this job is personal. Back in Recife, police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his sons Sergio (Igor de Araújo) and Arlindo (Italo Martins) are called away from the celebrations (Euclides is amusingly sweaty and covered in confetti) to investigate a dead shark — and the human leg in its stomach. Wait what?
The Secret Agent is a complex, sprawling narrative full of interesting characters (Udo Kier shows up for a scene!) but have no doubt that this film belongs to Wagner Moura. And I’m only partly saying that because I don’t really know the political and historical context this story is commenting on! Moura plays Armando as such an interesting, compelling character, you just wanna know what he’s thinking and why he is the way he is. Especially why he’s so hot. You gotta give it up for someone who looks that good at 49.
This was my first Mendonça film, but its clear he’s someone to watch. The Secret Agent dances between tension, drama, action, and even some pretty surreal stuff in its nigh-three hour runtime. And the way he ties his storytelling into his filmmaking is really impressive to a simpleton like me – who would have thought this was actually about how we preserve and understand heritage and history? And the value that has in our lives? Not me going in, that’s for sure. I wanted to see some spy shit. Which there’s very little of, the title is kind of ironic… it doesn’t really click until pretty close to the end when we see a pretty shocking newspaper clipping. It’s a real cool ending, like I said above very No Country For Old Men or a better version of what The Brutalist was trying to do with its epilogue (I liked that movie a lot but act three disappointed). See what I mean about all the best picture comparisons? No wonder The Secret Agent is joining the Criterion Collection this September!