{"id":313346,"date":"2025-11-25T19:38:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T19:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/313346\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T19:38:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T19:38:11","slug":"the-secret-agent-review-wagner-moura-leads-rousing-political-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/313346\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Secret Agent\u2019 review: Wagner Moura leads rousing political thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can almost smell the sweat in \u201cThe Secret Agent,\u201d<\/a> a stylish, slow burn thriller about radicals and mercenaries in 1977 Brazil. Filmmaker Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho<\/a> begins his film with the note that it was \u201ca time of mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sly kind of promise of what\u2019s to come over the next 2 \u00bd hours, where audiences will meet hit men, zombie legs, corrupt cops, a two-headed cat and a quiet man named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) who is running away from something \u2014 and into something possibly more dangerous. The film opens in limited release<\/a> Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Death is everywhere in Recife<\/a>, where life has taken on a kind of surrealism as raucous Carnival celebrations drag on and the body count gets larger. Academics and journalists are being persecuted under the military dictatorship, and dissenters seem to often end up dead. But the music is good, the beer is cold and the shirts are buttoned low and haphazardly (if at all). The violence is casual and so is the sex.<\/p>\n

The film opens as Marcelo stops for gas on the outskirts of town, where a decaying body is barely covered by cardboard. Flies and dogs swarm for a taste of the carcass, which the attendant says has been there for a few days already. The police have said they\u2019ll get to it when they can. When a cop car does pull up, they don\u2019t go for the body, however: They\u2019re out to inspect Marcelo and his yellow Beetle. It\u2019s tense and foreboding, a tone that is sustained for the duration. Like Marcelo, the audience is never not bracing for the worst. Thankfully it\u2019s often punctured with humor and absurdity. <\/p>\n

A title like \u201cThe Secret Agent\u201d might make one suspect that Marcelo is some kind of slick operative in this world. The film teases out exactly why he\u2019s on the run, why his young son is living with his in-laws and why some wealthy man has hired two other men to kill him, but he doesn\u2019t seem like a guy with his own body count. Though he might not be a movie spy in the traditional sense, he is operating in this world almost as a ghost, changing his name and trying to live quietly in plain sight while waiting for the persecution to end. The understated performance won Moura best actor at the Cannes Film Festival<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole network of ordinary secret agents in Recife, some protecting, some selling information to the highest bidder. The film is framed by a modern-day archivist listening to taped recordings of phone tappings and an interview by a woman, Elza (Maria Fernanda C\u00e2ndido), who is kind of a lawyer, kind of a preservationist \u2014 documenting a history that the newspapers can\u2019t even cover in a straightforward manner.<\/p>\n

One of the strangest threads is a recurring motif of a disembodied hairy leg, apparently a local urban legend, and useful metaphor in times of oppression. In one sequence, a woman is reading a newspaper story about how it attacked a group of gay men in the night. It\u2019s brought to life with absurdist, gory glee, with the film turning into a B-picture scream fest for a few minutes.<\/p>\n

Udo Kier<\/a>, who died this week, also gets a memorable, upsetting sequence as a Holocaust survivor and local tailor whose scars the local police treat as a museum curiosity. The film is full of wonderful actors, including T\u00e2nia Maria as the godmother of the leftists in hiding, Carlos Francisco as Marcelo\u2019s father-in-law, Enzo Nunes as his \u201cJaws\u201d-obsessed son, and Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone as the hit men on his tail. <\/p>\n

Mendon\u00e7a Filho also returned to his childhood home to make the documentary \u201cPictures of Ghosts,\u201d about the town\u2019s classic movie palaces. In \u201cThe Secret Agent,\u201d he gets to rebuild one of those vanished theaters and use it as a central location.<\/p>\n

Like the infectious and haunting needle drops, from Donna Summer\u2019s \u201cLove to Love You Baby\u201d to local hits of the time, \u201cThe Secret Agent\u201d is the best kind of personal film, imbued with so many things that Mendon\u00e7a Filho loves, both resurrection and elegy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Secret Agent,\u201d a Neon release in select theaters Wednesday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \u201csome full nudity, sexual content, language and strong bloody violence.\u201d Running time: 158 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can almost smell the sweat in \u201cThe Secret Agent,\u201d a stylish, slow burn thriller about radicals and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[2224,941,161497,14271,161499,88,161501,26806,161500,161495,3140,26808,161496,10815,206,161498,18598,160312,121903],"class_list":["post-313346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-brazil","tag-carlos-francisco","tag-central-america","tag-donna-summer","tag-entertainment","tag-enzo-nunes","tag-film-reviews","tag-gabriel-leone","tag-kleber-mendonca-filho","tag-latin-america","tag-lindsey-bahr","tag-maria-fernanda-cndido","tag-media","tag-movies","tag-recife","tag-south-america","tag-udo-kier","tag-wagner-moura"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}