Back in the Seventies, in the Brazilian city of Recife, a “hairy leg” became an urban legend, popularised knowingly by the press as a scapegoat for all the violence doled out by the military police. That myth resurfaces in Brazil’s powerhouse Oscar contender The Secret Agent, when a disembodied limb is pulled from a shark’s belly and brought to grotesque life: a sentient killer, rendered in janky stop-motion as it hops around the streets with vengeance on its mind, terrorising the locals. A conventional political thriller, this is not.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s excavation of Brazil at the time of its military dictatorship plays out somewhere between hallucination and pulp fiction – mixing spaghetti western violence with Hitchcockian suspense and scabrous horror-comedy. It’s set during carnival in 1977 Recife, where a man arrives in a sunshine-yellow VW Beetle, amateur assassins lurk in every shadow, and the local cinema is showing Jaws to a population already on edge because of the newspaper stories circulating about that murderous leg.
The man in the Beetle is Marcelo, a research scientist who crossed the wrong government minister and now has professional killers on his trail. Wagner Moura plays him with a matinee-idol magnetism, suave yet rugged in the face of mortal danger. Still grieving his late wife Fátima, whose death weighs on him constantly, Marcelo is holed up in a safe house run by Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a principled resistance operative with a whisky-soaked rasp who shelters refugees and arranges new identities. His young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), staying with cinema-owning grandparents, represents his only reason to keep fighting. Sebastiana finds Marcelo a job at a government records office – the irony isn’t lost – where he searches for traces of his own disappeared mother while trying to stay invisible. The hitmen are closing in; the corrupt police captain they’re drinking with knows exactly where to find him.
Moura, star of Netflix’s Narcos and Alex Garland’s ever more prescient Civil War, won Best Actor at Cannes for this and is up for the Oscar; you can see why. Playing it close to the bone, Moura is by turns soulful and seductive, letting grief and paranoia simmer beneath that preternatural composure rather than boil over. He’s flanked by scene-stealers: Maria, all gravelly authority and cigarette-roughened wisdom, and Udo Kier, who died late last year, in a brief but forceful cameo as a tailor and Holocaust survivor.
Mendonça, whose unhinged dystopian western Bacurau won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019, is working at the top of his game. The Secret Agent pulses with heat and colour – carnival reds bleeding into coastal golds, sun catching on bright Beetle bodywork and people’s faces, every frame saturated with summer. It’s visually ravishing, making dictatorship-era Recife feel tactile and immediate. Mendonça drools over period detail in ways that feel transporting: manual typewriters shrouded under plastic dust guards, bubble-shaped phone booths that seem plucked from a modernist fantasy, faded cinema marquees advertising The Omen. Movie theatres – the subject of his 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts – double as resistance hideouts.
At 160 minutes, the film teeters on self-indulgence, but it moves freely from scene to scene, propelled by Mendonça’s energetic camerawork and a performance that elevates Moura to the top table. Towards the end, we’re dropped into the present day: archivists are studying old tapes, and we realise Marcelo’s story has been preserved across generations. It’s clever and bold. Few thrillers this year will risk this much, or land it so powerfully.
Dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho. Starring: Wagner Moura, Tânia Maria, Enzo Nunes. Cert 15, 160 minutes.
‘The Secret Agent’ is in cinemas from 20 February
