There is a genuinely great film buried somewhere inside The Secret Agent — you can feel it most acutely in its opening hour, which crackles with the kind of lean, paranoid energy that recalls the best American thrillers of the 1970s. The setup is nothing short of genius. Armando, played by Wagner Moura, is an academic forced into hiding after clashing with big business interests aligned with Brazil’s authoritarian regime, who want to get their hands on his research. It is a premise rich with moral texture — an industrialist from São Paulo exploiting government funding destined for universities for his own private interests, and an academic whose bitter refusal to play along is enough to make him a marked man. The injustice at the heart of the film is immediately legible and genuinely enraging: a man of principle, ground down by a system designed to protect the corrupt and punish the honest.
The world Mendonça Filho conjures in these early passages is extraordinarily vivid. Set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, the film immerses you in a city alive with Carnival noise and colour while simultaneously radiating dread. Every crowd feels like a potential threat. Every friendly face might be an informant. The cinematography is gorgeous and unnerving in equal measure, and the director’s command of space and geography — the way Recife itself becomes a character, both sanctuary and trap, is masterly. There is a yellow Volkswagen in the opening scene that reportedly nods to The Shining, and it fits: this is a film steeped in cinematic memory, in love with genre and aware of its own history. For that first hour, it pulses with a grindhouse vitality that feels directly descended from the paranoid classics of 70s cinema — The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor – films that trusted their audiences to keep up and rewarded that trust with genuine suspense.
Wagner Moura is extraordinary throughout. His presence is fresh, empathetic, often hypnotic, and never overacted — he has mastered the ability to personify a character in all its nuances and throughout the entire narrative arc. He carries the film on his shoulders with remarkable ease, making Armando’s fear and exhaustion and quiet determination feel entirely real. In the smaller, more intimate moments — navigating a city that is both familiar and hostile, tiptoeing around strangers who may or may not be watching — Moura is as good as anyone on screen this year. There is a particular scene involving the late Udo Kier, in one of his final screen appearances, that lingers long after the film ends; Moura’s reaction in that scene says more than pages of dialogue could. He deserves a better-assembled film around him.
Then the wheels come off.
Somewhere around the midpoint, the film’s tone begins to curdle in ways that feel less like bold artistic choices and more like a loss of nerve — or possibly a loss of direction entirely. The narrative becomes deeply, frustratingly opaque. What had felt like purposeful withholding of information gradually begins to feel like the film simply does not know what it wants to say, or how to say it. Characters arrive and depart without sufficient weight. Subplots accumulate without payoff. The military dictatorship backdrop, so vivid and menacing in those early passages, gradually recedes into abstraction, replaced by a web of intrigue that the film seems unwilling — or unable — to fully untangle. The story is overlong and annoyingly convoluted, and we do not arrive at anything resembling the film’s actual central plot until roughly the two-hour mark of a two-hour-and-forty-minute runtime. That is not slow-burn storytelling. That is a film that does not know what it even is.
There is a sense that the director is so enamoured of his own material, so immersed in the textures and details of this recreated Recife, that he has lost sight of the audience’s need for momentum and clarity. Several loose ends are left hanging, and with such a long runtime, those threads and the entire story deserved to be completed on screen. What the film gains in atmosphere it loses in coherence, and by the time the third act finally arrives, you may find yourself watching with a kind of detached admiration rather than genuine investment.
And then there is the leg. A disembodied leg that comes to life and kicks a couple mid-intercourse. I have sat with this scene for some time now and I am no closer to decoding what it is meant to convey, because I am not sure even the film knows. Taken in isolation, it is the kind of surreal eruption that could work in a more consistently committed picture — something in the tradition of Buñuel, or the wilder reaches of Latin American magical realism. But The Secret Agent is not that film, or at least it has not earned the right to be that film by the time this moment arrives. It lands like a grenade thrown into a drawing room, shocking less for its imagery than for its sheer tonal incoherence. It is the single most absurd scene I have encountered in a prestige film in years, and not in a way that feels intentional or illuminating. It exemplifies the film’s broader problem: Mendonça Filho is clearly a filmmaker of immense talent, but The Secret Agent too often mistakes bewilderment for profundity, and strangeness for depth.
The final act, when it arrives, feels rushed and oddly weightless given everything that preceded it. There is a Tarantino-esque burst of violence near the end that some will find cathartic — and admittedly, after two and a half hours of tension and confusion, it provides a certain visceral release — but it feels imported from a different, more straightforwardly genre-minded film. The epilogue that follows deflates whatever energy that sequence generates, and the film ends on a note of quiet melancholy that might have been moving had the preceding two hours done more to earn it.
The Secret Agent is, without question, the most bewildering Best Picture contender in recent memory — a film that arrives draped in Cannes laurels and critical adoration, and yet consistently resists the basic pleasures of the form it initially appears to be embracing. The acclaim is not entirely mysterious: there is real craft here, real intelligence, and Moura’s performance alone is worth the price of admission. But good intentions and a distinguished pedigree do not automatically produce a satisfying film. It refuses to tell you what kind of film it is, and not always in a rewarding way. A second viewing might unlock something I missed. I am sure at least one critic left scratching their head at Cannes only to find it came alive on a rewatch, and I can believe that the film has depths I have not yet deciphered. But the first viewing is the one that counts for most of us, and on a first viewing, The Secret Agent is an experience defined overwhelmingly by frustration, offset by moments of admiration. It is the most disappointing of the year’s ten nominees: a film that begins as a thriller and ends as a riddle you are not sure you wanted to solve.
★★
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