O Agente Secreto / The Secret Agent (2025)

Keeping your head down is difficult when the state keeps asking your name.

Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho · Approximately 161 minutes in the classified release
Starring: Wagner Moura · Tânia Maria · Robério Diógenes · Carlos Francisco · Udo Kier

Source-based first draft. Verdict and advisories are proposed; numerical Corny DNA remains unscored. Explore the 2025 collection.

In The Secret Agent, danger is often somebody deciding that a conversation has become their business. A traveller needs to answer a question. An official offers protection. A name goes onto a document. Each ordinary exchange can reveal how little privacy a person is permitted when authority is accustomed to helping itself.

The official synopsis places Marcelo in Recife during Carnival in 1977, trying to reunite with his son while escaping a threatening past. Kleber Mendonça Filho gives that predicament a city full of other people, habits and histories. The film's patience lets suspense become part of daily life, with room for warmth, vulgarity and surprising eruptions of the absurd.

Before you watch

Strong bloody violence, corpses and injury detail, political persecution, and racist and homophobic language. There is strong sexual activity and nudity, including comic public sex; dialogue also briefly refers to rape. Child bereavement and a parent's distress are present. A dead animal is cut open. The BBFC advice supports these distinctions. The rape reference occurs in dialogue; the child-related material concerns bereavement.

A refuge has to be made by people

Wagner Moura makes Marcelo's watchfulness legible without turning every pause into an announcement of concealed expertise. His restraint gives small acts of patience and irritation some weight. The question is how much of himself he can safely disclose in any given encounter.

The people around him keep that caution from becoming the film's only emotional register. A refuge can offer conversation, food, rules and inconvenient personalities. Tânia Maria's presence is especially valuable in making care feel like something exercised through practical authority and familiarity. Safety remains fragile, but the household has a life beyond the mechanics of hiding somebody.

That texture helps the political material. A threatening state is easier to understand when the viewer has been given people whose routines it can interrupt. The film allows the audience to care about a place as more than the setting of the next attempt on a protagonist.

Bureaucracy can make a person disappear twice

Names, records and spoken accounts keep returning because existence on paper is a form of power. A document can preserve a trace of somebody. It can also become the place where another person decides what their life is allowed to mean.

Mendonça Filho connects that problem to the film's construction. Recorded voices and the movement between periods make the act of learning about the past part of the drama. The director's press-notes interview discusses the role of archives and oral history in developing the film. The resulting interest is visible in how attention travels towards material that official accounts might discard.

That gives the period setting a purpose beyond recognition. Objects and locations can be used, remembered, repurposed or lost. The film lets them accumulate meaning before asking which parts will remain available to somebody looking back.

The city has more than one way of telling a story

The tonal range is a major strength. Corrupt officials can be frightening, officious and ridiculous in the same exchange. Their absurdity does not remove their practical ability to hurt someone. It makes the exercise of power feel less dependent on an unusually intelligent villain.

The stranger passages extend that logic into local folklore and popular imagination. The film allows a grotesque story to acquire a public life while other violence becomes harder to describe directly. The precise image belongs below the spoiler boundary, but its function is more substantial than a random eccentric flourish.

The cinema material also belongs to this network of memory and invention. A screen offers a shared experience, and the building around it becomes part of how people remember being together. The film's interest in popular entertainment does not make the historical danger less serious. It gives those living through it more than one kind of experience to leave behind.

The length asks for a particular kind of attention

The main reservation is a genuine condition of the film's design: it takes time to let peripheral lives, anecdotes and spaces register. At roughly 161 minutes, that expansiveness can feel loosely held before its later connections become clear. A viewer seeking a continuously accelerating pursuit has a reasonable basis for finding the pace frustrating.

Not every tonal movement lands with equal ease. A burst of grotesque comedy can temporarily overwhelm a quieter emotional thread. The density is often rewarding, but density alone is not evidence that every passage needs its full duration.

The year and runtime also need a clear note. The film premiered at Cannes in 2025, under the original title O Agente Secreto. Cannes records 158 minutes; the BBFC cinema release runs 160 minutes 30 seconds. This review uses the latter approximate timing and does not infer an undocumented change of cut from the discrepancy. Later regional release dates do not change its catalog year here.

Corny DNA

There is irreverence and deliberately grotesque strangeness inside a serious film about power and memory. Those moments can be funny without making the whole work an exercise in camp. Its claim on the viewer rests on atmosphere, performance and the accumulation of human traces. Numerical scores remain open.

Verdict

Worth watching — proposed. Moura's restrained performance, the inhabited sense of Recife and the connection between suspense and historical memory give the film substantial value. The caveats are length, a digressive structure and strong violence and sexual material. Best suited to viewers willing to let a thriller develop through place, conversation and competing accounts of what happened.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

What the record cannot return

Marcelo is Armando, whose testimony survives after he is murdered and publicly misrepresented. In the present, a researcher meets his adult son Fernando, who has no memory of his father but remembers seeing Jaws with his grandfather. Their former cinema is now the blood bank where Fernando works. The scene account corroborates these details.

The ending makes knowledge valuable without pretending it can repair every loss. An archive can challenge a lie while remaining unable to supply a son's missing relationship. Moura's second role as Fernando makes continuity visible in a face even as memory fails to produce the expected recognition.

The reanimated severed leg belongs to another kind of record: a grotesque public story that can occupy the space where repressive violence is difficult to report. The director's account connects the local legend with accounts of police and military repression. The film's absurdity therefore has a historical pressure behind it, rather than being an invitation to treat the persecution as trivial.

The repurposed cinema joins the two lines. Its former use survives in an ordinary memory, while the research reconstructs a more dangerous history. Neither account is complete. The ending's force comes from allowing both to matter without manufacturing a consoling reunion with everything that has disappeared.

Sources

The original title and Seen-list provenance are retained. The export confirms viewing, not approval of this proposed judgment or a fresh viewing for this draft.