The Secret Agent: Wagner Moura and the Brazil That Never Left Us

A Review by Kathia Woods

★★★★★ | Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 158 minutes | In theaters now

As a Brazilian watching The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho's brilliant political thriller set during our military dictatorship in 1977, I felt a familiar knot tighten in my stomach. Not because the movie brings back painful memories, though it does so with heartbreaking accuracy, but because it shows a harsh truth: Brazil has never stopped being the country shown on screen. We just know how to make our corruption look like democracy.

As Armando (also known as Marcelo), a technology expert turned political dissident who is trying to escape assassination attempts ordered by a corrupt industrialist, Wagner Moura gives the best performance of his career. Armando goes back to his hometown of Recife during Carnival to see his young son again. He finds that the colorful, lively city he remembers has turned into a maze where death is always waiting, hired by men who see murder as just another business expense.

Moura's work here is nothing short of a revelation. Gone is the explosive intensity that made him famous in Narcos. In its place, he offers something far more devastating: the performance of a man forced to disappear while remaining visible. His Armando moves through Recife with a watchful melancholy, his soulful eyes constantly calculating distances to exits, weighing the risk of every human interaction. When he first enters Dona Sebastiana's boarding house and meets his fellow residents—each one carrying their traumas from the dictatorship—Moura's face becomes a map of recognition, empathy, and shared grief. It's the kind of acting that reminds us why cinema exists.

Mendonça Filho's brilliance is not in depicting the dictatorship as a remote historical atrocity, but in illustrating how corruption permeates our existence. The bad guy in the movie isn't a general in a uniform; it's a rich businessman who casually orders hits between business meetings and haggles with assassins over rates like he's buying a house. This is the Brazil we know well: a place where the rich and powerful do not need tanks because they possess money, connections, and the freedom to act as they please, having done so for generations without facing punishment.

The movie shows what younger Brazilians often have a challenging time understanding about the dictatorship: how life went on even when people disappeared. While the Carnival is going on, 91 people are reported dead in the news. Kids beg to see Jaws while their parents discuss neighbors who went missing overnight. Brazil is the place where joy and fear, life and death, and everything else exist at the same time. We dance because we have to; if we stop, we'll have to face the void below us.

Mendonça Filho shoots 1977 Recife with loving, careful detail, showing the crumbling colonial buildings, the lively street life, and the racial and class divisions that are a part of every Brazilian city. But fear always takes away from the beauty. Even the tender moments between Armando and his son are heavy with the weight of tragedy that is about to happen. We know how these stories end. We have lived them.

The Secret Agent is a must-see for Brazilians not because it is historically accurate (the period reconstruction is perfect), but because it is a painful mirror. The industrialist who orders Armando's death could be any of the businesspeople who pay for political campaigns today and see our democracy as something to be bought and sold. The people who work with the regime to spy on their neighbors for favors? They're still here, but they wear different uniforms and work for different people. Their morals are still the same.

The end of the movie, which I won't give away, doesn't bring comfort or redemption. It only shows how memories never go away and how inconvenient truths are erased. It hits us hard and makes us face Brazil's greatest talent: our ability to forget what we need to remember and remember what we need to forget.

Moura's acting and Mendonça Filho's unwavering vision come together to make not only one of the best movies of the year but also a necessary look at who we are as a country. The Secret Agent reminds us that the dictatorship didn't end; it just changed. The corruption stayed. The lack of punishment continued. And we, the people, keep paying the price while the powerful change history to make it look good for them.

This is the Brazil that never left us. Moura makes us feel every crushing moment of that truth.

The Secret Agent is Brazil's official submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It won Best Actor and Best Director at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and is currently playing in select theaters.