Name: The Secret Agent
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Genre: Thriller, Drama, Crime
Released: 2025-11-06T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 161 min
Cast: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Gabriel Leone, Alice Carvalho, Isabél Zuaa

A man can change his name, his job, even the city where he sleeps. What he cannot change is the file a government keeps on him, and the distance between the self a person performs and the record the state holds is the engine of The Secret Agent. Kleber Mendonça Filho drops a fugitive into a Recife swollen with Carnival and lets the festival do double duty, as cover and as exposure.

The man on the run is a technology expert who has shed the life that marked him and come home for the one thing the running was meant to protect, his young son. He moves through the city under the name Marcelo, among people who should recognize him and mostly choose not to. The early stretch plays as a held breath, a thriller that understands the most frightening surveillance is often the volunteer kind, conducted by neighbors with time on their hands.

Casting Wagner Moura as the hunted is the film’s sharpest decision. Audiences first knew him as the riot-gear certainty of the Elite Squad films and the swaggering appetite of Narcos, men who carried the machinery of force on their backs. Here that authority is confiscated down to nothing. Moura plays someone whose every advantage has been taken, and the performance lives in small administrative panics, a man working to recall which lie he told which official. The actor who once embodied the state now plays its quarry, and the inversion gives the role its current.

Mendonça Filho has spent a whole cycle of films mapping one coordinate, the Recife of apartment towers and contested street corners, from Neighboring Sounds to Aquarius to the genre detonation of Bacurau. His recent archival essay on the city’s lost movie houses showed how completely he reads place as memory. The Secret Agent pushes that obsession back into the dictatorship and installs it inside the chassis of a paranoid thriller, the line that runs from Costa-Gavras through the watchful American conspiracy pictures, where the hero’s antagonist is not a villain but a system that never sleeps and never forgets. It is the rare genre exercise built by a filmmaker who treats the archive as a leading character.

Part of what makes the film hard to file is how cheerfully it raids pulp. A severed hairy leg turns up to haunt a neighborhood cinema, hired killers arrive from out of town with the bored professionalism of men on a per-diem, and the street carries the sound of a city that hums with its own music. Mendonça Filho braids tabloid grotesquerie into the political dread without letting either cancel the other, the way the paranoid pictures of an earlier era slipped horror and satire into their procedural bones. The film keeps threatening to become three movies at once and mostly refuses to choose.

What the film argues, beneath the chase, is that a regime’s most durable weapon is clerical. People vanish, but ledgers survive, and the late movement reaches into a present where researchers sift the leftover paper for names. Mendonça Filho is drawn to the long tail of authoritarian record-keeping, the way a bureaucracy outlasts its own violence and sits waiting to be read. The Carnival frame sharpens the question. A culture that organizes itself around masks becomes the ideal place to ask who gets to choose a face and who has one assigned.

None of this guarantees the halves cohere. A film that runs well past two and a half hours and asks its genre machinery to share the room with a memory essay is betting that the suspense and the elegy strengthen each other instead of canceling out. The device that folds the past into the present can tip into the director annotating his own theme, and a thriller that keeps stepping outside its own clock risks loosening the grip it works so hard to build. The Secret Agent does not so much resolve the pull between its pulse and its mourning as live inside it, and a viewer who came for the cat-and-mouse may feel the elegy slowing the hunt.

Wagner Moura in the 1977-set thriller The Secret Agent — Wagner Moura in *The Secret Agent* (2025)

Alongside Moura, the ensemble includes Maria Fernanda Cândido, Gabriel Leone, Alice Carvalho, Isabél Zuaa and Udo Kier, with Mendonça Filho credited for both script and direction. The picture is a Brazilian production carried abroad by MUBI, with NEON handling the United States, and it became Brazil’s official entry in the international race after taking more prizes than any other title at its Cannes premiere, Best Director and Best Actor among them.

That festival haul turned into one of the season’s widest awards campaigns, and the film carried four Academy Award nominations into the ceremony, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best International Feature. It runs 161 minutes. NEON gave it a limited United States opening on November 26 before a Hulu debut on March 1, and United Kingdom audiences reached it through MUBI’s theatrical run on February 20.