One of the great powers of film as a medium lies in its ability to capture mood. Film offers a narrow prism into its subjects’ lives, two hours against a whole existence. The saying that the journey is more important than the destination has become a bit of a cliché. Some subjects, particularly fascism, carry more weight from the perspective of the atmosphere.

The film The Secret Agent (Original Portuguese title: O Agente Secreto) beautifully captures the all-encompassing nature of a brutal dictatorship. The narrative follows Armando (Wagner Moura), a former professor on the run. Armando travels to Recife during the Carnival, where his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) lives with his dead wife’s parents. Armando syncs up with a dissident network run by the elderly Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who connects him with a job at an identity card office, which gives him a chance to search for information on his dead mother.

Director Kleber Mendonça Filho crafts an exquisite portrait of 1970s Brazil and its all-encompassing paranoia. An open sequence centers on Armando filling up for gas outside the city. A dead body sits fifty feet from the gas station, barely covered with a piece of cardboard. The police soon arrive, not to investigate the corpse, but to shake Armando down for a “donation,” making their priorities clear.

Mendonça Filho presents his narrative with the trappings of a political thriller. Armando encounters a corrupt politician, Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), who hires cheap hitmen to kill him. While his son is desperate to see Jaws, Armando’s only consistent communication with family comes from meetings with his father-in-law at the movie theater where he works as a projectionist.

Moura puts forth a spectacular performance in the lead role. Armando has all the trappings of a classic 70s thriller protagonist, a calm demeanor with an understated sense of suavity. You feel Armando’s paranoia through every frame, an exhausted man with no choice but to keep going, impeccably easy to root for.

Mendonça Filho has a constant bag of tricks for his audience through the film’s imposing 161-minute runtime. There’s a subplot involving a severed leg that transforms into a surrealist sequence. Set against the backdrop of Carnival, Mendonça Filho throws constant atmospheric whiplash at his audience, forced to reckon with the reality that authoritarianism never takes a breather, even in moments of celebration.

The film further upends expectations with a time-jump to the present, where a student (Laura Lufési) is researching the underground movement that Armando was a part of. Just as Armando was trying to uncover information about his mother, researchers in the present day were trying to learn about his history. The cycle continued.

Thrillers often spend their whole runtime building tension for a dramatic payoff. Mendonça Filho is a master at tension, but his work looks beyond the kind of payoffs that film typically offers. You don’t need to see a man like Armando topple over a fascist regime to see the power in his story. History is rarely as neat as film often tries to make it out to be. The power of resistance is not always measured in success, but through the human heart’s refusal to bow down to tyranny.

The Secret Agent is often a challenging watch. Mendonça Filho’s sense of pacing occasionally edges his audience to the point of frustration, all in service to his powerful broader themes. History rarely leaves us with all the pieces. Some people want answers to the broader politics of the era, others just want to remember the summer blockbuster they enjoyed amidst the carnage.

secret agent review