If you had told me that “City of God” or “Elite Squad: The Enemy Within” took home Oscars for Brazil, I would have believed you. However, it wasn’t until last year’s “I’m Still Here” that Brazil won its first Academy award. But now, the country has a shot at taking down the best international feature film category two years in a row. “The Secret Agent” is Brazil’s submission to the 2026 Academy Awards, and from all of the buzz the film has gotten as well as its cultural relevance and high level of quality on every front, I’m quite confident that it will end up securing one of the five nominations spots.
“The Secret Agent” tells a story that is far more down tempo and meditative than one might expect from the title. The film does pack heaps of tension and thrills in the back half, but it’s a slow burn that really takes its time getting into thrilling territory, and its primary goals lie elsewhere. This is a film that is far more interested in scrutinizing the subjects of perception, memory, and corruption than delivering on action and excitement.
The film was written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, known for the films “Bacarau” and “Aquarius.” This was my entry point to Kleber’s work, but I will absolutely be seeking out his earlier films when I get the chance (I did actually attempt to watch “Bacarau” previously but the copy I received didn’t have English subtitles). All of Kleber’s directorial choice in “The Secret Agent” feel thoughtfully considered and executed with ingenuity and panache, while his script makes bold choices in terms of structure and even bolder choices in regards to withholding information and leaving things unsaid and/or unseen. For his excellent work on the film, Kleber went home with the best director award from Cannes—the film was also one of the 22 films nominated for this year’s Palme d’Or but lost to “It Was Just an Accident” (which I will be getting to soon).
Wagner Moura stars as Armando, though he’s more commonly referred to as Marcelo, the alias he’s forced to live under as a political refugee banned from travel and marked for death within the dictatorship that was in control of Brazil in 1977. It takes a while for Armando’s goals to become apparent since he plays everything so close to the vest. Principally, he’s motivated by a desire to get his son out of the dictator-controlled region, to find proof of the existence of his mother (which is more difficult than one might expect and ties wonderfully into the film’s multi-faceted exploration of memory) and to simply be able to live and be true to himself without threat from the corrupt government. This is a complex character played with a great deal of subtlety and restraint, where warmth, fear, and outrage are all lying just below the surface. It’s a role that was written specifically for Moura, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else being able to convey the same level of depth and nuance that he brings to the role. And that seems to be a sentiment shared by many, as Moura won the best actor prize at Cannes.
“The Secret Agent” is a film that you might get more out of if you go in with some background knowledge of the ’70s Brazilian political landscape. Without that background, the film still does a pretty good job of conveying everything you need to know internally, such as with its great Udo Kier scene (rest in peace, legend). Kier leaves a major impression in his only scene in which he plays a holocaust survivor who pretends to instead be a wounded Nazi soldier in order to be treated better by the local police, which really tells you all that you need to know about the mindset of the police and the broader regime of the time.
The film is set in 1977, but it’s just as much about more recent Brazilian politics. Kleber told IONCINEMA that the film was heavily inspired by the events during and just before the rule of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and the feelings that those events caused. This isn’t the proper venue to cover the numerous fascist crimes of Bolsonaro, but know that he was just sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup to avoid giving up the presidency after losing his re-election campaign (sound familiar?), which went as far as involving planned assassinations of his opposition, per the BBC. As they told The Hollywood reporter, Kleber and Moura suffered direct consequences from the fascist Bolsonaro regime as they were both vocal critics of the administration and were targeted as a result. Before “The Secret Agent,” it had been over a decade since Moura was last able to act in Portuguese, and in case it’s not obvious, that was not by choice. Moura described it as being extremely liberating to be able to act in his native tongue again as it bringing a sort of clarity to his acting process.
Kleber also faced tremendous pressure from the Bolsonaro presidency, especially in regard to his 2016 film “Aquarius.” As reported by Variety, Kleber used the film’s premier at Cannes to stage a protest against the coup d’etat in Brazil. In retaliation, the overtaken Brazilian government stifled and sabotaged the release of “Aquarius,” and the film was prevented from serving as Brazil’s submission to the Academy Awards that year, with the far less acclaimed but politically non-subversive “Little Secret” stealing its place after multiple other potential nominees all voluntarily withdrew from the running in solidarity with Kleber. His next film, “Bacarau,” also led to persecution from Bolsonaro’s government, to the extent that a lie was concocted to allegedly extort half a million dollars from Kleber under the guise of reclaiming ill-spent government production money.
Corruption is on this film’s mind, as it were. It isn’t spelled out in explicit detail, but “The Secret Agent” draws a line between the modern corruption of Bolsonaro and the corrupt regime of the ’70s, with only the latter being showcased directly. Without getting too specific so as to avoid spoilers, the film makes use of a more modern plot line that sort of takes the place of a framing device, though its introduction into the film is delayed until further into the runtime than is typical of this sort of frame narrative. This modern component juxtaposed against the ’70s setting of the primary plot is a fascinating and outside-the-box storytelling choice. It accomplishes a lot for the film, including bringing the exploration of governmental corruption across generations into sharp relief; technology might evolve, a movie theater might become a blood bank, but some things never change.
Luckily, Brazil has changed for the better it seems. With Bolsonaro off to prison, Kleber described Brazil’s future as looking bright again for storytellers and artists of all stripes. An age of creative oppression and censorship has finally been brought to a close, and both “I’m Still Here” (which was also targeted by government suppression, unsuccessfully) and “The Secret Agent” are shining examples of this seismic shift for Brazilian cinema.
With all of that context in mind, “The Secret Agent” is a clear triumph. But how is it as a film in isolation if (for some reason) all of that vital context was stripped away? Well, it’s excellent, and it really is one of 2025’s best films in terms of pure cinematic value.
Even though the film is preoccupied with showcasing corruption, it still makes room to showcase the beauty of Brazilian culture at the same time. Carnival celebrations as the backdrops to several scenes, kids playing football with a piece of fruit, a woman passing out handmade coxinha… it all adds tremendously to the vibrancy of the setting. Another director telling this story of dictatorship and corruption may have left the setting looking entirely oppressive and bleak, but Kleber finds little moments of joy that remind us of why better times are worth fighting for and that it’s never a lost cause, even as the death toll during the carnival festivities approaches triple digits.
That absurdly high death toll is something that the police revel in. We don’t see much of it happening, but we do see the aftermath or the removed consequences, and death is a presence that can be felt all around in the film. The opening scene features a corpse on the ground at a gas station covered over with cardboard, and we learn that it has been there for days already with nobody doing anything about it. You could call this corpse a plot point, but it’s treated more like set dressing, meaning death is a part of the setting of “The Secret Agent” in a literal sense. Elsewhere in the film, Armando continues to see and hear about deaths happening all around, whether it’s a girl run over by a bus or a severed leg found in the mouth of a shark (which leads to an out-of-left-field comedic sequence that I won’t spoil but is a highlight of the film).
For a long stretch of the film—arguably a bit too long—interesting things happen around Armando without the man himself being particularly active. We’re kept in the dark as to his motives and goals for quite a while in a way that I’m not sure benefits the film. The craft on display sets a continuously high bar with striking images mined from naturalistic setups and a killer soundtrack providing several memorable needle drops, but our protagonist was left feeling a bit unmoored throughout the early stages of the film.
At over two and a half hours long, “The Secret Agent” is a pretty hefty film, and it’s certainly in no rush. It embraces a slow-burn vibe and really takes its time getting all of the pieces in motion. “The Secret Agent” is not one for those with short attention spans. It demands patience of you out of the gate and then richly rewards that patience later on. There’s one scene that takes the form of an interview of sorts, and it’s in this conversation that all of the character motivations and goals that I had been craving finally came to light. From this point on, the remainder of the film’s hefty runtime breezed by so fast that I was blindsided when I realized it was wrapping up, having expected there to still be another 40 or so minutes to go. Any hesitations I had early on were wiped clean as soon as Armando’s backstory was finally elucidated and the threat against him was brought into focus. The remainder of the film is tense, thrilling, unpredictable, and exceptionally well made.
samkench.com 
Leave a comment