‘The Secret Agent’ is a movie about how vital the movies are

A corpse lies outside a gas station. It’s been under the blazing sun for the past three days. The police have been called, but they’re busy. When they do arrive, it’s just as Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura, Narcos) is about to drive off. The cops direct their attention not to the body, but to him. “You can trust me,” says one officer, in the tone of voice that immediately implies otherwise. They examine his documents, search his car. It’s a menacing enough sequence but the eventual reveal that Armando is in hiding, travelling under an alias—and is a target of Brazil’s dictatorship—retroactively adds another layer of peril to this suffocating scrutiny.

“I wanted it to be like those James Bond movies, which begin with a sequence that feels like the end of some other story,” said writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho of this scene in an interview to A Rabbit’s Foot. Nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Moura, The Secret Agent draws on the audience’s familiarity with spy movies—consider the film’s title itself—only to refashion their tropes. There are forged passports, tapped phone lines, assumed identities and assassination plots. And yet, these aren’t the imagined intricacies of spy craft, but reflective of a grim reality.

Unlike the Bond films, Armando, a former professor, is not in service to his country but under attack from it. He can’t envision globe-trotting, only desperately hope to immigrate with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), if they are to survive. (In the film’s sweetest subversion, Armando is told someone left him a message. Primed to deal with another furtive telegram, he instead receives a note from Fernando telling him to have a good day.)

Set during the late-1970s, The Secret Agent recounts a period of military dictatorship and political violence in Brazil, during which dissidents were tortured, killed and disappeared. Reminders of death are everywhere, from news reports of the mounting death toll at the ongoing Carnival to a body tossed into the sea only to end up inside the stomach of a shark. Armando’s wife died of illness—that’s how he gently puts it to Fernando—but there’s a nagging implication of foul play.

Even the film’s sole stretch of fantasy, in which a severed limb attacks couples on park benches and in parked cars, references a cruel history—the director, who worked in a newsroom in the 1990s, is evoking an urban legend invented by Brazilian journalists two decades earlier to circumvent censorship. “Hairy leg attacks” reported in newspapers were code for orchestrated instances of police brutality against the country’s queer population. The sequence has—ironically and infuriatingly—been edited out of the film’s India release.

Mendonça Filho, a former film critic, is well aware of cinema’s transformative power—its ability to alchemise images and ideas into something that feels real and tangible in the dark of the movie theatre, and maybe even after. In one scene, a woman walks out after a screening of horror movie The Omen (1976), convulsing violently. Armando, on his first visit to the theatre, thinks she’s possessed. “This is that movie,” his father-in-law—the projectionist—explains. To this end, the director crafts The Secret Agent as not just a movie about movies, but one about the vital importance of cinema itself, particularly as a preservation tool. The film unfolds in his hometown of Recife and frames the act of remembering as crucial, particularly against a state apparatus working everyday to erase people.

Its immersive period detailing suggests a meticulous reconstruction of the past so as to immortalise it. Its meandering pace is much like the process of recollection itself—imprecise, non-linear, informed by what we prioritise—and a rebuke to those who would rather the story not be told. Several scenes are staged in the projection booth of Recife’s São Luiz cinema, a location that recurs in Mendonça Filho’s deeply personal, melancholic 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts (MUBI), which narrates the origin of his cinephilia and the death of his town’s movie palaces. The erasure of history and loss of the collective moviegoing experience permeate The Secret Agent’s end too, by which time the cinema has been converted into a hospital.

“Fiction films are the best documentaries,” says a character in Pictures of Ghosts, a line that resonates in a film determined to locate a kernel of truth even in its characters’ personal fictions. The refugee apartment complex Armando finds shelter in once belonged to a young woman. Her aunt’s official story is that she moved; the grim fact is that she was murdered by her fiancé. In having her eventually confide in one of her tenants though, the film seems to be saying that the desire to let the truth be known, to preserve the accuracy of memory, wins out.

Other times, the characters seek the anchoring weight of reality—Armando searches for his late mother’s identity card at the city office, seeking tangible proof that she existed. Similarly, in Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024), which chronicles the same time, the receipt of a death certificate is the unlikely source of happiness for a widow, underscoring the tragedy of shattered families deprived of answers after their loved ones were forcibly disappeared (it won Best International Feature Film at last year’s Oscars, becoming the first-ever Brazilian-produced film to win an Academy Award). Here, Armando’s anxieties are echoed in Fernando, who also worries about one day forgetting what his late mother was like.

On the other hand, Brazil as a country is often defined by its desire to forget, said Mendonça Filho in an interview to Time magazine: “It’s like a self-inflicted amnesia to avoid discussing its unpleasant past.” The film then, is his emphatic reminder. Its recurring theme of posterity is rendered more poignant by the flash-forwards, which reveal present-day student researchers looking into historical records of Armando and Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), the leader of a political resistance movement.

Mendonça Filho has namechecked Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) as an influence and it’s easy to see the parallels. If Steven Spielberg’s film is about a connection that persists across a language barrier, characters in The Secret Agent reach out across a temporal one. As Armando and Elza record their conversations, someone in the future cares enough to listen. Earlier in the film, the bureaucrat targeting Armando had tasked hitmen with putting “a hole in his mouth”, or rendering him mute. Decades on, his voice endures.

It’s another Spielberg movie that lends the film its most wrenching moment. Fernando—based on Mendonça Filho’s own childhood memories of being obsessed with Jaws (1975)—fixates on drawing sharks as a child, unaware he and his father are being circled too. The Jaws poster gives him nightmares. Present-day Fernando recounts that the moment his grandfather finally took him to see the film, however, the bad dreams stopped. Having a greying Moura play this older Fernando makes for a startling intrusion of the past into the present, a man who has his father’s face, but tragically, none of the memories they once shared. His anecdote is illuminating—in The Secret Agent, it’s what you can’t confront or remember that’s all the more traumatic.

In a late gut-punch, we find out Armando’s story was officially rewritten to paint a false picture. Even so, the truth makes its way to his son. “I told the story out of order,” says Armando, voice captured on the recording. In depicting how people’s histories were cruelly revised and contrasting constructed narrative against the real deal, The Secret Agent makes the case for how essential it was for him to have told it anyway.

Gayle Sequeira is a Mumbai-based film critic.