The Secret Agent, the latest feature by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked gas station outside Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil’s northeast. It’s Carnaval 1977, “uma época cheia de pirraça”—a time of mischief, the subtitles tell us. For those familiar with Brazilian history, this places us roughly halfway through the country’s 21-year military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.
A man from out of town pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with boxes and suitcases. After parking, he notices something disturbing: a human corpse, barely covered by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summer sun. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot dead by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn’t expect the police to show up until Ash Wednesday. “I’m almost getting used to this shit,” he complains affably while wiping down the windshield.
The Secret Agent, the latest feature by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked gas station outside Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil’s northeast. It’s Carnaval 1977, “uma época cheia de pirraça”—a time of mischief, the subtitles tell us. For those familiar with Brazilian history, this places us roughly halfway through the country’s 21-year military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.
A man from out of town pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with boxes and suitcases. After parking, he notices something disturbing: a human corpse, barely covered by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summer sun. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot dead by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn’t expect the police to show up until Ash Wednesday. “I’m almost getting used to this shit,” he complains affably while wiping down the windshield.
Just as the stranger—played by Wagner Moura (a Brazilian superstar best known to U.S. audiences, unfortunately, for his sad-sack Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos)—is about to leave, a pair of cops shows up. They are oblivious to the body; their real purpose is to size up the out-of-towner.
This opening scene lasts 15 minutes and offers little in the way of exposition or payoff. The cops take off after claiming a paltry bribe; the fate of the dead thief is never resolved. Yet the scene sets the tone for the rest of the film, whose languid, painterly style allows Mendonça Filho to offer up a series of canny observations on life under, and after, authoritarianism. The theft, the murder, the looking away; a useless investigation that disappears when a bribe is paid; and, at the edge of the screen, a stinking corpse that everyone involved would rather ignore.
The opening scene from The Secret Agent.IMDB
In 1964, Brazil’s generals—with backing from the U.S. State Department—overthrew the democratically elected government of President João Goulart. Like the dictatorships in neighboring Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, Brazil’s ditadura was marked by censorship and the repression of labor unions and left-leaning political parties—not to mention the kidnapping, torture, murder, and disappearances of its real and perceived ideological enemies. In 2014, a National Truth Commission revealed that tens of thousands of Brazilians were detained and tortured during the dictatorship, with at least 434 murdered or disappeared.
Still, in recent years, right-wing movements across South America have made dictatorship apologia part of their pitch to voters. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting to dispatch the military in his quest to overturn the results of the 2022 election. During his trial, he defended his actions in part by citing a common right-wing line of reasoning that the architects of the 1964 coup were the saviors of a nation threatened by a dictatorship of the proletariat. Current Argentine President Javier Milei has trolled the post-dictatorship slogan “memory, truth and justice” by amplifying calls for a “complete memory”: one that turns its attention away from the regime’s crimes and toward the kidnappings and assassinations committed by left-wing guerrillas. Meanwhile, José Antonio Kast, Chile’s recently elected president, first forayed into politics as an organizer of the “yes” campaign for the 1988 plebiscite that would have kept Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power for another eight years.
With the political left in retreat across the region, the banner of what Spain’s socialist government calls “democratic memory” has been taken up by writers, artists, and filmmakers, many of whom were children during periods of dictatorship.
Mendonça Filho was born in Recife in 1968, four years into Brazil’s dictatorship. A loyal son of the city, he has now set three features and a documentary in his hometown, whose sights and sounds seem to be an infinitely renewable resource of artistic inspiration; his breakout feature, Neighboring Sounds (2012), was filmed in Setúbal, the neighborhood he grew up in. (One character even lives in his mother’s real-life apartment.) Mendonça Filho’s films are marked by a warm sense of humor and a keen eye for dissecting Brazil’s striated society. While his previous feature, the dystopian Bacurau (2019), left Recife—and realism—behind, The Secret Agent conjures up a charming, chaotic vision of the filmmaker’s hometown, teeming with rich colors and delightfully specific details.
The stranger, it turns out, is a research scientist called Marcelo. He has come to Recife to pick up his 5-year-old son, Fernando, and flee the country, though for the first half of the movie it’s not clear why. While Marcelo waits for a false passport, he’s given shelter by an irrepressible elderly woman named Dona Sebastiana (played with winning aplomb by Tânia Maria).
Even amid the exuberance of Carnaval, unease looms over the city. The local police chief (Robério Diógenes), who tries to befriend Marcelo, makes a joke about a newspaper headline that has the Carnaval death toll at 91: By the end of the holiday, he says, it’ll be over 100. The police are responsible for at least one of those deaths; after a human leg turns up in the belly of a dead shark, they do what they can to make this evidence of extrajudicial murder disappear.
The suspense ratchets up with the arrival of a pair of killers—baby-faced Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) and his stepfather, Borba (a terrifying Roney Villela). They’ve been dispatched by São Paulo industrialist Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), who orders them to “leave a big hole” in Marcelo’s mouth. By the time we finally learn why Ghirotti is hounding Marcelo, the film shifts unexpectedly. Another plotline, set in the present day, introduces two young women, apparent researchers, listening to tapes recounting Marcelo’s story. When we return to 1977, the strands between the storylines begin to twist and tighten, building toward the film’s dramatic conclusion.
This daring narrative swerve interrupts Marcelo’s story at its moment of maximum tension, leaving key questions unanswered. Among them: whether Ghirotti had a role in the death of Marcelo’s wife, Fátima, played in a brief but scene-stealing flashback by Alice Carvalho. When I first saw the film, I was irked by this lack of resolution. But upon reflection, I began to appreciate Mendonça Filho’s gesture. Though the Brazilian Truth Commission’s report on state-sanctioned murder and torture runs to nearly 2,000 pages, no official document can ever provide a full account for the way authoritarianism worms its way into daily life. For that, we need art. Especially the kind of art that details how the powers that be can find a way to thrive in just about any political structure. (Ghirotti, who orders the hit on Marcelo, also serves on the board of Eletrobras, Brazil’s state-owned electric utility; it’s not hard to imagine his thuggish son as a fervent Bolsonaro supporter.)
Our questions about “what really happened,” Mendonça Filho suggests, will stick around whether we ignore them or not. Like the hairy leg pulled from the shark’s belly, they remain undigested.
Director Kleber Mendonça Filho and Moura on the set of The Secret Agent. IMDB
For too long, Hollywood has portrayed dictatorship as a totalitarian, all-encompassing affair—whether in the grim, washed-out Soviet bread lines or the dark glamor and clinical efficiency of Nazi Germany. The Secret Agent is a welcome corrective, particularly for those of us living through the steady erosion of democratic norms.
It’s been a banner year for Brazilian cinema. The Secret Agent, already receiving significant international acclaim, follows on the heels of I’m Still Here (dir. Walter Salles) winning best foreign feature at the 2025 Oscars. The two films are interesting companion pieces, and not only because Brazil has nominated The Secret Agent for Oscars consideration. Together, they offer up a more nuanced portrait of authoritarianism than the typical Hollywood fare. Both juxtapose the menace and paranoia of the dictatorship with the sexual and psychedelic liberation of Brazil’s revolutionary tropicália cultural movement. Each film also features characters in the present who literally cannot remember the events that have unfolded onscreen, emphasizing the difficulty—and vital importance—of excavating the past.
Despite their thematic similarities, the films are tonal opposites. I’m Still Here is a stately, measured drama that depicts the dictatorship’s devastating effect on a middle-class family. The film’s real-life protagonist, Eunice Paiva (played by Fernanda Torres), is a model of courageous insistence. Her refusal to play along or accept half-truths and lies, even after the generals were no longer in power, should be celebrated. Would that we all—let alone those in positions of political and corporate leadership—had her fortitude.
A scene from The Secret Agent.IMDB
Yet despite The Secret Agent’s over-the-top zaniness, I wonder whether it ultimately offers a more believable portrait of life under authoritarianism. Its vision is certainly more small-d democratic: Marcelo—and by extension Mendonça Filho—spends far more time among the office cleaners, movie projectionists, and low-level bureaucrats than he does with his fellow intellectuals. This is a world where the difference between a wealthy industrialist, a smooth-talking professional hitman, and a clownish cop comes down to a matter of a couple thousand cruzeiros. Meanwhile, the rest do what they can to get by. This is neither a cynical nor scolding portrayal; Mendonça Filho seems genuinely amused by our foibles, even as he clearly admires those who speak up (like Fátima and the spritely Dona Sebastiana) and those who work hard, against every obstacle, to stitch together the truth (like Flávia, one of the present-day researchers, played by Laura Lufési).
In his book How Fiction Works, the literary critic James Wood argues that fiction’s ability to represent reality comes down to its creator’s attention to seemingly irrelevant details. For Wood, these details layer fiction with tiny mysteries; as we try to make sense of them, we come to feel that we’re writing alongside the author.
In the end, The Secret Agent succeeds because of its astonishing abundance of these tiny mysteries, seen in the brilliant cast of supporting characters, the lush streetscapes of Recife’s now-abandoned centro, and the proud nordestino accents in the dialogue. The film teems with physical and narrative details so finely drawn and so attentively photographed that, as viewers, we feel compelled to make this deeply personal story our own—to remember, alongside Mendonça Filho, that neither the past nor the future belong to the would-be dictators.