I walked into The Secret Agent expecting another brooding, self-serious international prestige thriller, the kind of movie that arrives with capital-I Importance and dares you to breathe wrong. Kleber Mendonça Filho makes something else entirely. The Secret Agent is sprawling and pulpy and constantly alive, a 161-minute crime movie that plays like an ode to Brazilian genre cinema without ever feeling like empty cosplay. It is full of little decisions that should be distracting, but they accumulate into a story with real propulsion. Even when the plot is withholding, the imagery keeps pulling you forward.
Wagner Moura plays Marcelo, a man who returns to Recife during Carnival in 1977 to retrieve his son Fernando, who has been living with Marcelo’s in-laws after the death of Marcelo’s wife. The opening stretch treats Marcelo like a question mark. He is present, watchful, careful about what he says, and clearly known by people who do not want to say his name too loudly. The city around him feels like it is performing normalcy while something rotten hums beneath the surface. Mendonça Filho films Recife as a place of warmth and noise and movement, but also as a place where the wrong glance can become a file, a rumor, or a threat.
The movie’s first half is also busy in a way that feels intentionally messy. A police chief named Euclides, played by Robério Diógenes, investigates a severed human leg found inside a captured tiger shark, a grotesque detail that lands like a sick joke and a warning shot. Other threads drift in and out like overheard conversations. Contract killers. Corporate power. Local authorities with shifting loyalties. It can play like a pile of pulp paperbacks tossed onto a table, all lurid hooks and odd notes, until Mendonça Filho starts tightening the screws and you realize how carefully he has been arranging the pieces.
Once Marcelo’s backstory comes into focus, The Secret Agent becomes a chase movie without the typical chase-movie shape. Marcelo has history with a powerful executive, and that executive has hired men to find him. The police, led by Euclides and fed by the wider machine of corruption, start circling too. Marcelo’s plan is simple on paper: get his kid and disappear. The film makes that plan feel impossible, not because it stacks set pieces on top of each other, but because it turns Recife into a maze of eyes and favors and quiet surveillance. Even when nothing “happens,” you can feel the walls moving.
Mendonça Filho’s storytelling is crosscut and playful, and it is hard not to think of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Brian De Palma in the way the movie juggles a large cast, builds tension through intersections, and finds humor in ugliness without undercutting the stakes. There is also a streak of Quentin Tarantino in the way it lets genre pleasure coexist with dread, the way it treats certain reveals like punchlines, and the way it uses pop culture echoes, including pointed nods to Jaws and even The Omen. But The Secret Agent never feels like it is borrowing someone else’s voice. It is too specific for that. The details are Brazilian. The paranoia is Brazilian. The particular flavor of institutional menace feels lived-in.
What really carries it is how good Wagner Moura is at playing a man forced to be both father and fugitive. Marcelo has tenderness, but it is tempered by experience. He is not a hero in the clean, inspirational sense. He is a man trying to survive systems that have already decided what he is worth. Moura makes Marcelo’s restraint feel like intelligence, not just gloom, and that restraint gives the movie room to surprise you when it finally turns volatile. Robério Diógenes is a perfect counterweight. Euclides reads as both ridiculous and terrifying, a local authority figure shaped by a broader culture of impunity, capable of real investigative focus while still acting like a cog who enjoys the power of being a cog.
Then Mendonça Filho does something bold in the final stretch. The last thirty minutes pivot away from the immediate thriller mechanics and jump forward, widening the lens to ask what any of this leaves behind. It is a move that could have felt like an afterthought or a lecture, but it lands as the film’s emotional thesis. The violence, the corruption, the fear, the small acts of resistance, they all risk becoming footnotes, distorted by time or erased by the same powers that benefited in the first place. The movie ends with a bleak, lucid reminder that governments do not just control bodies, they control memory and narrative; what gets brought along and what gets left behind.
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The Secret Agent is not tidy. It leaves loose ends. It makes choices that are more interested in texture than clarity. But the payoff is a crime epic that feels rare in the current landscape, both serious and fun, both angry and seductive, both propulsive and reflective. Kleber Mendonça Filho turns political rot into genre electricity, and Wagner Moura anchors it with one of the best leading roles this decade. It is one of the most engaging films I have seen in years, the kind of thriller that gives you images you will carry around long after it’s over.
Score: 9/10
The Secret Agent (2026)
- Cast: Wagner Moura, Carlos Francisco, Tânia Maria, Robério Diógenes, Roney Villela, Gabriel Leone, Alice Carvalho
- Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
- Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
- Runtime: 161 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: January 27, 2026
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