The Secret Agent: Living in a world that carries on regardless

There is something faintly perverse, and therefore rather wonderful, about a film that opens on a rotting corpse and then refuses to make that the most alarming thing in the frame. The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, is set in 1977 Brazil, though it might just as well be set in that peculiar corner of history in which absurdity begins to feel like a coping mechanism.

The man at its centre, Armando Solimões, played with an almost frightening composure by Wagner Moura, is not a secret agent at all. He is a widower, a father, and an academic who has had the bad luck of irritating the wrong minister. This is quite enough, in a military dictatorship, to turn one’s life into a prolonged act of evasion. And so, he adopts the name Marcelo, who arrives in Recife in a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle, which feels like exactly the wrong colour for someone trying not to be noticed. But nothing in this film behaves quite as expected.

Recife itself is in the throes of Carnaval, all water guns and confetti, while somewhere not very far away, bodies are being disposed of with great efficiency. The contrast is not hammered home. It simply exists, which is what makes it so unsettling. Mendonça Filho has a gift for letting horror seep in through the edges of ordinary life. A police officer can inspect a car with a lazy menace while ignoring a corpse a few feet away. A grandmotherly woman can run a safe house with the brisk warmth of someone organising a dinner party.

The plot unfolds in three parts, each teasing out another layer of Marcelo’s predicament. There is his reunion with his son, who is more preoccupied with seeing Jaws than with the political nightmare unfolding around him. There is his job at an identification office, a delicious irony given that he is living under an assumed identity. And there is the slow tightening of the net, as corrupt policemen and hired killers drift in and out of his orbit with casualness.

Mendonça Filho fills the frame with distractions that are anything but incidental. The cinema run by Fernando’s grandfather hums with life, a place where people gather, flirt, gossip, and watch films within the film, turning the act of spectatorship into part of the narrative texture. You begin to feel that the real story is not what happens to Marcelo but what happens around him.

In The Secret Agent, the cinematography has a way of appearing almost too relaxed for its own good, and that is precisely why it works. Mendonça Filho favours wide, densely populated frames that allow life to spill over. Crowds drift through Carnaval streets, interiors hum with small, telling movements, and even moments of danger unfold without visual hysteria. The script is similarly unhurried, almost novelistic in its structure. It loops through characters, detours into minor incidents, and lingers on processes that would be discarded in a more dutiful thriller. Yet these digressions are the point.

Moura holds everything together with a performance that is all restraint and buried panic. Marcelo is not a hero in the conventional sense. He is simply a man trying to stay alive, to protect his son, and to hold on to some idea of himself.