LGM Film Club, Part 565: The Secret Agent

As I’ve worked through Kleber Mendonca Filho’s films–2019’s astounding Bacurau, 2023’s film essay about growing up in Recife during the dictatorship, Pictures of Ghosts–I’ve thought, wow, this is really one of the great unsung filmmakers in the world. He’s a lot more sung now with his wildly acclaimed film from 2025, The Secret Agent. Starring a wonderful Wagner Moura, it follows a man on the run from people who have gotten him fired and now, as he finds out part way through the film, have ordered his assassinations. He’s not even a political guy. He’s an academic who ran afoul of someone who hated the fact that a bunch of brown people and hippies from the North would take resources from universities in the South and so ordered an institute closed. Our lead lashed out and here we are. It’s a low-key but tremendously powerful discussion of life in 1970s Brazil, where the dictatorship wasn’t really doing a daily repression thing, but rather would snuff out anyone who stood in the way of the rich and powerful. Filho, who has a strong pulp side to him too, includes a grotesque scene of a caught shark that has a human leg in its mouth. Said leg later bounces around and kills people in a park engaging in gay sex. It’s absurd and some find it silly, but it’s both a metaphor for media sensationalism and the indifference of Brazil to anti-gay violence. The supporting cast is also incredible, including the last role for Udo Kier before his death.

There’s at least three great films about political resistance in their own way last year–The Secret Agent, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle after Another and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident. None of the three really make the case that anyone can defeat the powers of evil, though Anderson gets the closest. If Panahi is filming about his own life and the lives of his friends in Iran and Anderson is using a somewhat mythological past to understand the present, Filho really is focused on the past here, the roots of modern Brazil in the Bolsonaro era. Rating the three, the Anderson is slightly less successful, but it’s interesting though perhaps not surprising that in an era where political change for the better seems so difficult and real solutions so fleeting that the best directors out there have started tackling these exact topics.

Anyway, great movie, you should watch it.