The Secret Agent Review: Wagner Moura In A Political Thriller That Refuses Easy Answers

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and led by Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent is set in 1970s Brazil, but it doesn’t unfold like a conventional period drama. It moves in fragments. Stories appear, disappear, overlap. There are “parts” that feel almost novelistic. In the first half, you’re not entirely sure how any of it will converge and that disorientation feels intentional. The film isn’t interested in hand-holding. It wants you to sit inside the uncertainty.

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Moura plays Marcelo, a teacher who flees to Recife after the death of his wife, carrying his small son and an unnamed dread. From the moment we meet him, there’s a weight to him — as though he is running from something and toward something else at the same time. Two assassins shadow him, yet the film refuses the velocity you’d expect. If you’re imagining a Brazilian Bourne, forget it. The pacing is languid, almost stubbornly so, punctuated by flashes of surreal, dark comedy that make you question whether you should laugh at all.

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The film had arrived amid festival acclaim and awards buzz. It premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it emerged as one of the most honoured titles, earning Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho, Best Actor for Wagner Moura, as well as the FIPRESCI Prize and the Art House Cinema Award — a rare sweep that pushed Brazilian cinema into the international spotlight. Since then, it has gone on to garner multiple nominations from the Golden Globes and the Oscars including nods for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Casting and Best International Feature Film — making it one of the most talked-about films of the awards season. First released theatrically in Brazil and parts of Europe in late 2025, the film is only now reaching audiences here with English subtitles — a delay that has built anticipation among cinephiles who’ve been tracking its journey from festival favourite to awards contender. 

A World Populated With Presence

While Wagner Moura is the gravitational centre of the story, he’s surrounded by a cast whose work deepens the film’s emotional and cultural stakes. Tânia Maria delivers a quietly unforgettable turn as Dona Sebastiana, an elder figure whose spirit and resilience feel like the beating heart of Recife itself. Gabriel Leone’s Bobbi brings both menace and vulnerability as one of the hunters on Marcelo’s trail, while Maria Fernanda Cândido’s Elza embodies the fierce grace of the resistance movement that flickers through the narrative. Robério Diógenes as Euclides and Carlos Francisco in smaller but pivotal roles add texture to the political underground that Marcelo navigates, and even unexpected faces like Udo Kier bolster the film’s noir-tinged tensions. This ensemble anchors the world around Moura with voices and histories that feel lived-in. 

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Politics In Fabric

The wardrobe is understated but deeply intentional. Marcelo’s teacherly silhouettes — soft, slightly rumpled shirts, muted earth tones, nothing sharp or flashy — feel like a man trying not to be noticed. There’s a quiet middle-class realism to it. No cinematic hero styling. No glamour.

In a film about surveillance and fear, the clothes almost function as camouflage. The 1970s detailing is subtle: collars, textures, the way fabrics sit in the heat. Nothing feels costume-y. It feels lived in. That’s important. Because this isn’t nostalgia. It’s memory.

Recife As Mood

Recife isn’t just a backdrop. It breathes. The coastal humidity clings to every frame; the slightly decaying facades and sun-bleached buildings feel steeped in something unspoken. The town is both open and claustrophobic at once — expanses of light and air, yet an undercurrent of being watched.

And then there’s Carnival — that defining pulse of Brazilian and South American culture, famous for its dancing, music and ecstatic colour. In the film, the festivities aren’t romanticised; they’re reframed. Between bursts of rhythm and collective release, we’re confronted with the stark reality of death tolls, the fragility beneath the spectacle. Celebration and consequence sit side by side. Joy doesn’t erase violence; it coexists with it.

There’s a small-town intimacy to it. You sense that everyone knows more than they are saying. The architecture holds onto political residue; the walls seem to remember. Recife feels less like a location and more like a psychological landscape, mirroring Marcelo’s interior state — space without safety, light without relief.

Time, Memory, And The Violence That Lingers

And then there’s the structure. The film plays boldly with time, folding past, present and future into one another in ways that feel deliberate and disorienting. Certain narrative turns are hinted at before they fully unfold, creating a quiet tension that sits beneath even the stillest scenes. It feels like opening a time capsule that hasn’t decided which decade it belongs to. The result is raw and quietly unnerving. You’re not watching events build neatly toward a climax; you’re watching history echo through individual lives.

Filho layers the film with exquisite period detail — the textures of a small Brazilian town, the humidity, the muted interiors — but beneath the stylisation is something bruised. For all its showmanship and a final act that flirts with Tarantino-esque flourish, the emotional ache never dissipates. 

Wagner Moura, Recalibrated

What stayed with me most, though, was Moura. We’ve seen his intensity before, but here he plays Marcelo with restraint. Hollowed out, tender with his son, perpetually bracing. It’s a reminder of his range, of how he can inhabit menace and melancholy in the same breath. There’s no vanity in the performance. Just a man fraying at the edges.

Watching Across Language

Watching a Portuguese language film with English subtitles added another layer of intimacy. You lean in differently. You read faces more closely. The cadence of Brazilian Portuguese — its softness, its urgency — sits against the starkness of the political landscape in a way that feels almost poetic. There’s something quietly powerful about experiencing a story across language, about trusting tone and expression to carry you through history that isn’t your own, yet feels strangely familiar.

For an Indian viewer, that sense of inherited rupture resonates. The film never draws parallels, but it doesn’t need to. It’s a story about what power leaves behind. About how history lingers in ordinary homes, in classrooms, in the way a father looks at his son. Memory fractures across generations. Nations move forward; people carry the residue.

Did the ending feel slightly anti-climactic? Maybe. I found myself grappling with what it all meant. 

The Secret Agent is thematically dense, visually arresting, and culturally specific in a way that makes it universal. It’s not an easy watch. It’s not meant to be. But it’s the kind of film you leave still assembling in your head — and for me, that’s always a sign that something has quietly shifted.

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