The Secret Agent (2025)
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s, is on the run. Hoping to reunite with his son, he travels to Recife during Carnival but soon realizes that the city is not the safe haven he was expecting.
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29 films that influenced The Secret Agent
What critics say influenced The Secret Agent
…like the hairy leg found in a dead shark’s belly (a nod to the filmmaker’s love for Spielberg’s JAWS)…
It's a movie that's about "1977, when we were all exhausted by the nightmare of Brazilian political and social life", but it's also about "1977, when we were all really obsessed with Jaws"…
Marcelo’s son, who likes to spend time with his grandfather, Mr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), projectionist at the local cinema (no doubt inspired by a real person we know from Kleber’s Pictures Of Ghosts), is obsessed with Jaws.
…a series of tiger shark attacks that reminds us of thrillers like Jaws (1975)…
…the cinema where he once saw "Jaws" used to stand…
…there’s also Marcelo’s son’s obsession with Jaws. Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster can be heard and seen continuously throughout the film at Recife’s ornate, palatial movie houses, offering little escapism to our on-the-edge protagonists.
On Palma, rather than any one film
…gnawing at the wide frame of Panavision to evoke a Brian de Palma-esque tension and playing with depth to amplify a sense of foreboding.
…early Brian de Palma movies…
…evoke a Brian de Palma-esque tension…
There are moments that evoke De Palma in their composition, complete with split diopters and surveillance-style framing…
…he references some of the great thriller directors in Hitchcock and De Palma…
Bacurau’s brief but full-on violence showed the denizens of the titular town weren’t backing down from their persecutors…
Things don’t go off-the-rails crazy like in Bacurau…
Filho is a master of conspiracy, and his dichotomy between the “good” and “evil” here is similar to Bacurau, in which the good guys have to move in silence while the evil men can run rampant and loud with little risk of harm.
Much like his previous film, 2020’s marvellous Bacurau, Filho weaves into the narrative a community run by a formidable matriarch.
…and the riotous violence and punk of Bacurau is here once more, with the director chopping at limbs and skin and bone alike, exploding and tearing and cutting with delicious mercilessness.
Like Bacurau, the film is shot in anamorphic Panavision, and just like Bacurau, it harnesses the specificities — and history — of the format to pay homage to the great classics Filho perhaps once watched at the same screens Marcelo peeks at through the projection booth window where sweat drips onto celluloid.
Aquarius showed exactly what your neighbors get up to behind closed doors…
His films Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019) unveil themselves like fairy tales, mythologies, or even dark and sinister Aesop’s fables.
…much like Aquarius, this is a film deferential to the preciousness of belonging, of rooting oneself in a home that goes beyond the proverbial…
Kleber Mendonça Filho, director brasilero de películas como «Aquarius» (2016), «Bacurau» (2019) y el documental «Retratos Fantasmas» (2023), vuelve al ruedo con «El Agente Secreto»…
The director of Neighboring Sounds (2012), Aquarius (2016), and Bacurau (2019) had already left a strong impression on me…
…through the drama Aquarius (2016) and the thriller Bacurau (2019), and now to this…
You have the feeling of community and camaraderie of Neighboring Sounds, with Sebastiana’s refugee commune proving a bustling microcosmos of shared loves, joys, and grief…
Much of the action takes place in Recife, Filho’s hometown which also hosted his debut “Neighboring Sounds” (2012)…
The director of Neighboring Sounds (2012), Aquarius (2016), and Bacurau (2019) had already left a strong impression on me…
Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho's ("Neighboring Sounds," "Bacurau") last film was "Pictures of Ghosts,"…
The films of Kleber Mendonça Filho—Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, Bacurau, and now The Secret Agent, along with documentaries like Pictures of Ghosts—always start with an enveloping sense of place, most often the city of Recife, his hometown on Brazil’s northeastern coast.
Recife has been the setting of much of Mendonça Filho’s work since 2012’s Neighboring Sounds…
…those who’ve seen Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts will recognize the city and its architecture…
But his two latest movies, Pictures of Ghosts (2023) and The Secret Agent (2025), find themselves wandering around in the abyss, wondering what went wrong, why, and how.
…the playful, elegiac documentary “Pictures of Ghosts” (2023)…
Especially his previous film, the documentary Pictures Of Ghosts, which features a lot of archival footage, seems to hold The Secret Agent inside of it, like a Russian doll, or maybe it is the other way around, as both films inform each other so much.
The Secret Agent arrives two years after Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, an intimate film about the movie palaces of his beloved Recife.
In that way, the film is a much more natural progression from “Pictures of Ghosts” than you might expect.
…when audiences weren’t scared out of their wits by The Omen…
The cinema plays The Omen, with Gregory Peck battling the pre-adolescent anti-christ, who keeps his mythologically hairy goat’s leg hidden, while Marcelo finds out he is under a death threat…
…covert meetings with a resistance leader in a local cinema, showing King Kong, The Omen and Jaws…
Marcelo visits his in-laws’ cinema and spies some amorous goings-on in the crowd during The Omen, of all films…
…the São Luiz, where Richard Donner’s The Omen sends customers running out in panic attacks…
It’s really quite touching, as are his subtle tributes to the two biggest films of the 1970s, “The Omen” and “Jaws.” We catch glimpses of each on Alexandre’s giant screen.
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On Hitchcock, rather than any one film
The filmmaker stages a wonderfully Hitchcockian anxiety-inducer of a set piece…
The respectable men in Hitchcock’s thrillers who find themselves at the centre of a diabolical plot of national political importance…
…he references some of the great thriller directors in Hitchcock and De Palma…
Mendonça Filho steeps “The Secret Agent” in the film language of the ’70s — “Jaws,” obviously, but also early Brian de Palma movies and the paranoid thrillers of the era, like “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.”
…its ’70s-set tale of institutional corruption and surveillance recalling the likes of Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View.
…similar to The Lives Of Others or All The President’s Men…
Mendonça Filho steeps “The Secret Agent” in the film language of the ’70s — “Jaws,” obviously, but also early Brian de Palma movies and the paranoid thrillers of the era, like “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.”
…its ’70s-set tale of institutional corruption and surveillance recalling the likes of Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View.
…it may well join the ranks of Pixote and City of God as a fundamental Brazilian classic…
The Secret Agent has a City of God or Amores Perros energy…
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…next to a simpatico picture, One Battle After Another – another thrilling entertainment with dead-serious things to say.
Arriving like an inadvertent Brazilian companion piece to One Battle After Another, Mendonça’s latest and most ambitious production, The Secret Agent, also follows a besieged leftist who’s hiding out among a network of political refugees at a time when the fascists are in charge.
Many of the best political satires from The Great Dictator to Dr Strangelove to The Firemen’s Ball paint their authoritarian targets as intimidating and incompetent alike.