This month, The Secret Agent, the latest film by renowned Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, hit theaters in the United States after its November premiere in Brazil. The feature was highly anticipated since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Mendonça won Best Director and Wagner Moura won Best Actor. The film is Brazil’s official submission to the 2026 Academy Awards and was recently nominated for three Golden Globes.
The release comes at the end of a remarkable year for the global recognition of Brazilian cinema. In February, Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and in March, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here became the first Brazilian film to receive the Oscar for Best International Feature.
I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent both take place in the 1970s, during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). This period has resonated strongly with domestic audiences, as the memory of the authoritarian regime continues to feature in public debate – Brazil, for the first time, is holding both civilian and military participants legally accountable for a recent attempted coup. Mendonça himself has claimed that, although set in the 1970s, The Secret Agent is not about the dictatorship, a term never mentioned in the film. Still, the feature not only offers the political commentary typical of Mendonça’s work but also highlights aspects rarely seen in cinematic depictions of the dictatorship. Popular films about this period have tended to focus on more well known instances of military violence against left-wing organizations or guerrilheiros, as in Wagner Moura’s Marighella (2019), or I’m Still Here’s depiction of the Paiva family. In The Secret Agent, however, the protagonist is entirely fictional and not directly involved in politics. Moreover, the military is not solely responsible for the violence he experiences. Here, though, the political message is less clear than in Mendonça’s earlier films, such as Bacurau (2019) or Neighboring Sounds (2012). With its fragmented narrative, The Secret Agent requires spectators to connect the dots of contextual knowledge—not an easy task even for domestic audiences, let alone international ones.
The Secret Agent is not about the dictatorship, a term never mentioned in the film. Still, the feature not only offers the political commentary typical of Mendonça’s work but also highlights aspects rarely seen in cinematic depictions of the dictatorship.
The film opens with Marcelo, played by Wagner Moura, stopping at a gas station. He becomes intrigued by a dead body lying on the ground wrapped in cardboard. It was a robber, shot by the night guard, the station worker explains. The action takes place during the 1977 Carnival, and the police probably will not bother to recover the corpse since the festivities result in many “incidents.” Two policemen appear; however, they have not come for the corpse, but to investigate Marcelo and his car. After finding nothing incriminating, they steal his pack of cigarettes. The sequence signals that the story unfolds in a world of deadly violence, intense surveillance, and police abuse.
Mystery persists as the plot unfolds slowly, leaving much unrevealed. The title itself is deliberately misleading: Marcelo is not a secret agent, but a persecuted man on the run. After the gas station incident, he arrives in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, and both his and Mendonça’s hometown. Marcelo’s first mission is to meet Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a 77-year-old woman who runs Edifício Ofir, hosting refugees living under false identities. The building functions as an oasis of solidarity for people threatened by the intolerant society outside its walls.
The film reveals little about these characters, leaving viewers to speculate. The group includes a couple from Angola, refugees of the civil war that followed 1975 independence; Álvaro, a likely neurodivergent young man; and Cláudia, a single mother of a small daughter. There is also a queer adolescent who has run away from his homophobic family. Even the house pet is unusual: a two-headed female tuxedo cat. As for Sebastiana, she only shares that she lived in Italy during WWII and joined communist and anarchist movements. We can infer that she fought fascism, which situates the critique of the 1970s dictatorship within a longer history of resistance against far-right regimes.
Marcelo is also a widower who travels to Recife to visit his small son, Fernando, who his maternal grandparents have raised since the death of his mother, Fátima (Alice Carvalho). The film does not clarify the circumstances of her death. Marcelo tells Fernando that she died of pneumonia, but given the context, it is quite possible she was murdered. The protagonist undertakes a third quest in his hometown: he asks for a job at the social registration department, hoping to find information about his mother, about whom he knows very little. The search, however, proves unsuccessful.
Mendonça’s political thriller doesn’t shy away from absurdity and gore. The caricatured deputy Euclides (Robério Diógenes) is called to a university, where scientists have discovered a human leg inside a dead shark—Recife’s beaches are famously known for the risk of shark attacks. Euclides is both goofy and sadistic. He and his subordinates drive through the city, apprehending supposed criminals whom they murder and whose bodies they throw into the Capibaribe River. Through this depiction of the dictatorship, The Secret Agent reminds us that police violence against political oppositionists coexisted with broader and older practices of state terrorism targeting marginalized communities.
The film reminds us that police violence against political oppositionists coexisted with broader and older practices of state terrorism targeting marginalized communities.
We can assume the leg swallowed by the shark came from a victim whose body had been thrown into the ocean. Euclides’ officers steal the leg from the forensic institute and replace it with an animal leg. The clandestine exchange sparks more absurdity: the press, complicit with the murderous officials, publishes sensationalist news about a hairy leg that hobbles through Recife at night, killing homosexuals who are cruising in a public square. The grotesque sequence in which we watch the murderous CGI leg comes with an added kick for the spectator who knows that the Perna Cabeluda (Hairy Leg) is a popular Recife urban legend. Thus, Mendonça appropriates his hometown’s folklore to satirize the dictatorship’s schemes to hide its crimes.
The film’s depiction of the intricate network of the regime’s allies is another striking element of its political stance. Spectators are informed early on that São Paulo entrepreneur Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) hired two hitmen to kill Marcelo. When the mercenaries arrive in Recife, they are welcomed by Euclides. Wealthy businessmen, private matadores, and state officials band together to orchestrate the barbarity that reigns over the country.
Marcelo only discovers that he is being hunted much later, when he meets Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), the organizer of the clandestine network that has been helping him. During their meeting, he reveals his real name, Armando, and shares some information about his past. The political turmoil began in 1974, when he was a professor of Engineering at the Federal University of Pernambuco. Ghirotti was the director of the state-run company Eletrobrás, then responsible for Brazil’s energy policies. He visited Armando’s department to cut its public funding, because its research clashed with his private company’s interests.
Although working for the state, Ghirotti makes it clear that his actions are driven by his personal business. This is an important depiction, since it contradicts the common belief that the dictatorship’s economic policy was based solely on nationalist state intervention. Strategic companies were indeed state-run, but the regime arbitrarily chose their directors: usually army officers themselves, sometimes an allied entrepreneur. In both The Secret Agent and Brazilian history, public and personal interests are difficult to disentangle. As such were the roles of the military state and of private capital in carrying out the dictatorship’s repression.
The Secret Agent emphasizes how Brazilian history is marked by identities that remained secret. Coloniality and structural violence not only exterminated people but also erased their narratives and silenced their legacies.
Little else about Armando’s story is explained, leaving viewers to fill in the blanks. The Secret Agent does not offer a happy ending. After realizing he’s being hunted, Armando asks Elza for fake passports to escape into exile with his son, but is ultimately gunned down in broad daylight. Reinforcing its distance from classical storytelling conventions, the film does not allow spectators to witness this finale. We only discover Armando’s tragic fate when the film cuts to present-day São Paulo, where two undergraduate students at a private university are digitizing documents donated by Elza’s family.
Flávia (Laura Lufési), one of the young women, who is Black, becomes obsessed with Armando’s story and investigates newspaper archives to better understand his fate. She discovers that Fernando is now a doctor in Recife and visits him, only to find a middle-aged man (also played by Wagner Moura) who has no memory of his father. Flávia asks about his maternal grandmother, and we finally learn that she was known as Índia, a generic, pejorative term for an Indigenous woman. She was an enslaved worker at his family’s house who became pregnant by the landlord’s son at 13 years old, most likely—we are made to assume—by rape.
The Secret Agent emphasizes how Brazilian history is marked by identities that remained secret. Coloniality and structural violence not only exterminated people but also erased their narratives and silenced their legacies. Armando knew nothing about his mother because she was an Indigenous victim of a longstanding colonial logic. Fernando was deprived of being raised by his loving father, and ultimately forgot him, due to the dictatorship’s civil-military terrorism. In this context, it is not accidental that it is a young Black woman who tries to give Fernando the right to memory he was denied by gifting him a flash drive with all the data she could save from his father’s case. As a descendant of enslaved African people, she is perhaps familiar with the experience of her ancestors’ identities being denied.
Luiz Ancona is a historian based in São Paulo, Brazil, who holds a PhD in Social History from the
University of São Paulo (USP). His work focuses on twentieth-century Brazilian history and
Brazilian film history