The Secret Agent

A Time of Great Mischief

The film opens with a title card that is almost offensive in its understatement. It declares the setting—Brazil, 1977—as "a time of great mischief." In the hands of a lesser director, this might play as glib irony. But in *The Secret Agent* (*O Agente Secreto*), Kleber Mendonça Filho uses this phrase to unlock a specific, terrifying truth about authoritarianism: terror does not always arrive with a bang; sometimes, it arrives with the surreal absurdity of a prank gone wrong.

Mendonça Filho, returning to narrative fiction after his archival reverie *Pictures of Ghosts*, has crafted a film that feels less like a historical drama and more like a fever dream incubated in the humidity of Recife. We are introduced to Marcelo (a haunted, bearded Wagner Moura) driving a canary-yellow Volkswagen Beetle into a rural gas station. There, a corpse lies rotting under a piece of cardboard, ignored by the attendant and the flies alike. The image—bright pop-art yellow against the brown decay of death—sets the visual thesis for the entire film. This is not the grayscale misery of the typical "dictatorship movie." This is a vibrant, sweating nightmare where the grotesque sits casually beside the mundane.

The director’s visual language here is suffocatingly tactile. Shot with anamorphic lenses that smear the edges of the frame with a vintage haziness, the film captures the texture of 1977 not as nostalgia, but as a trap. The production design does not just recreate the era; it weaponizes it. The brutalist concrete of the government buildings and the sticky, crowded fervor of Carnival create a labyrinth from which Marcelo, a former university professor turned fugitive, cannot escape.

At the film’s center, Wagner Moura delivers a performance of implosive power. As Marcelo—or "Armando," depending on who is asking—he is a man whose entire existence has been reduced to the act of looking over his shoulder. Moura, often known for his explosive charisma, here works in a register of muffled panic. He is a ghost haunting his own life, trying to reconnect with a son who barely knows him while dodging hitmen who treat murder with the casual annoyance of a bureaucratic errand. The tragedy of Marcelo is not just that he is hunted, but that he has been forced to become boring to survive. He buries his intellect and his passion under layers of silence, a self-erasure that hurts more than any physical violence.

The film’s brilliance lies in how it distracts us, much like the regime distracted the populace. The narrative detour involving a tiger shark and a severed leg—which spirals into a local urban legend about a "hairy leg" terrorizing the city—is a masterstroke of narrative misdirection. Mendonça Filho suggests that in a dictatorship, the truth is too dangerous to process, so society invents monsters it can understand to replace the ones it cannot name. The shark is a grim joke; the real predator is the unmarked car idling down the street.

By the time the film shifts gears into its modern-day coda, revealing the story as a puzzle being pieced together by a student researcher, *The Secret Agent* reveals its true ambition. It is not just a thriller about a man on the run; it is a film about the fragmentation of memory. Mendonça Filho argues that the violence of the past doesn't disappear; it just changes shape, becoming a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the scars. Tense, weird, and deeply melancholic, this is a film that refuses to let the dead rest quietly, reminding us that "mischief," when unchecked, leaves a body count.