What Kind of Country Is This?: On “The Secret Agent”

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is now in theaters, a MUBI Release.

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025).

In late September, a hush had fallen over São Paulo at night, as if everyone had decided to turn in early. The liquor being sold in the city was contaminated with industrial methanol, likely a result of clandestine counterfeiting operations that repackage illegal alcohol in empty bottles. As of this writing, the Health Ministry has confirmed 62 cases of methanol poisoning in Brazil, 48 of them in São Paulo, 16 of them fatal. Other victims have been rendered permanently blind. “If a rich person hadn’t died,” someone told me when I arrived in the city where I grew up, “no one would’ve cared.” 

I was in town to celebrate the marriage of one of my oldest friends. They served no spirits at the wedding; instead, they made caipirinhas with wine. The newlyweds stayed the night at an apartment building in the city’s historic center, a neighborhood known for its modernist architecture, active nightlife, and encampments of unhoused people. Just after dawn, they woke up to screams and groans of pain. There was a woman, visibly intoxicated, crouching on the banister of their sixth-floor balcony. The bride screamed. The woman screamed back, pounding her hands against the sliding glass door. Later they found out that she’d climbed the façade of the building from the balcony below. “It was out of a horror movie,” my friend said.

“What kind of country is this?” asked the popular 1980s rock band Legião Urbana in their irreverent anti-national anthem. “Fucking Brazil!” the audience sang back, at least when Capital Inicial later covered the track. It’s a place where nonsensical things happen. In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (2025), an urban legend comes to life in the form of a severed, hairy leg kicking and hopping of its own accord, terrorizing the nightcrawlers of Recife. It’s a surreal moment that has the feeling of everyday life in Brazil: Scary at first, then hilarious. As my friend was telling the story of the woman on her balcony, someone offered: “Spiderwoman.” We all laughed. Someone else raised a glass and joked, “Let’s go blind tonight.” 

This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (José Mojica Marins, 1967).

From 1964 to 1985, the people of Brazil lived under the rule of a violent right-wing military dictatorship. In the grips of the regime, filmmakers faced a paradox: In order to fund their productions, they needed money from Embrafilme, a state-owned production company and distributor linked to the censorship board. Before the coup, the Cinema Novo movement—in which filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos explored the miserable conditions in the country’s most neglected quarters—had been breaking into the international arthouse and festival circuit. Following in their footsteps, filmmakers under the dictatorship wanted to make films about Brazil, but the people signing the checks had a different idea of what Brazil was.  

An underground movement emerged: Cinema Marginal, much of it produced in São Paulo’s Boca do Lixo (“mouth of garbage”) neighborhood, not far from where that wedding-night scene took place. Júlio Bressane, Rogério Sganzerla, José Mojica Marins, and others circumvented Embrafilme to make films that depicted Brazil as “an absurd country, with no political or cultural perspective,” in the words of the Vladimir Herzog Institute’s archival project Memórias da ditadura. Mojica is commonly cited as one the most prosecuted filmmakers of the dictatorship, with a body of work that proved enormously popular despite—or perhaps because of—its overt blasphemy.¹ His most influential and infamous creation is the figure of Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe), a bloodthirsty undertaker who scoffed at every conservative Catholic value upheld by the regime. Mojica did what he could with whatever money he could get, but even then, the censors stepped in to impose different endings on his films, demanding that Zé do Caixão—the country’s most ardent atheist—conclude his misadventures by praying to God. 

In high school, we learned that clever artists tried to trick the censors’ brutish eyes by manipulating the Portuguese language to make meanings that would only register for a higher-minded audience. A classic standardized testing topic is Chico Buarque’s song “Cálice” (chalice), by which he really meant cale-se (shut up). But cinema had the disadvantage of being the least subtle of the mediums, if also among the most galvanizing. 

Entranced Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1967).

In the years leading up to the coup, President João Goulart had advocated for agrarian reform laws aimed at redistributing land to the peasants who cultivated it. In the rural northeast—the same region depicted in films like Rocha’s Entranced Earth (1967) and Santos’s Barren Lives (1963)—peasant leagues agitated for the reform, organizing a movement that inspired some leftists to believe that revolution was not far off, and that it would start in the arid backlands. The country’s right-wing factions and their American backers could smell communism from afar. 

In 1964, the filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho was in production on a movie about the assassination of João Pedro Teixeira, a peasant leader, starring nonprofessional actors who were themselves drawn from the peasant leagues. The regime didn’t wait for the cutting room to gut this one. The military intervened upon the shoot, apprehending whatever film and equipment Coutinho couldn’t salvage. After the fall of the dictatorship, the filmmaker returned to check in on the people who had agreed to be in his movie. The resulting documentary, Twenty Years Later (1984), is one of the great works of Brazilian cinema.

It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t; or, as we’d say in Brazil, If you run, the beast will catch you; if you stay, the beast will eat you. In 1977—the year in which The Secret Agent largely takes place—the Argentinian-Brazilian filmmaker Héctor Babenco made a blockbuster out of the story of a green-eyed bank robber from Rio. The heartthrob Reginaldo Faria played the eponymous robber in Lúcio Flávio, o passageiro da agonia, a gangster thriller that Mendonça Filho has described as “dirty and mean” and “ours”—meaning, essentially Brazilian. It’s a movie as much about the death squad, an organization of corrupt cops, as it is about Lúcio Flávio, who comes out seeming principled by comparison. Babenco was made to include a card at the end of the film claiming that the officers who both took bribes from Lúcio and conspired to kill him had been duly penalized for their actions. It was a bald-faced lie.

Lúcio Flávio, o passageiro da agonia (Héctor Babenco, 1976).

At the time Lúcio Flávio was released, the paranoid thriller was solidifying as the genre of a generation in the United States. In the wake of the countercultural 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal, the American consensus had begun to tear at the seams. Films such as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) allegorize a widespread mistrust in institutions, ensnaring their characters in webs of conspiracy that go all the way to the top. Sometimes, the protagonists have an interest in exposing the conspiracy: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, for example, in their effort to break the Watergate story. But just as often, they become embroiled in a plot that is well over their heads, as is the case of Warren Beatty’s Joseph Frady in The Parallax View:An ordinary citizen asks too many inconvenient questions, looks into stuff he’s not supposed to know about, and winds up dead. With The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho Brazilianizes that arc by steeping it in the country’s signature brand of corruption. 

The Secret Agent centers on Armando, a public university researcher in the state of Pernambuco. He and his department get caught up in a life-threatening conspiracy after a visit from Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a board member of Eletrobrás, the country’s largest power company, which was then owned by the state and linked to the Mines and Energy Ministry. Ghirotti doesn’t believe taxpayer money should be invested in the northeast, which he perceives as a backwater in comparison to the richer, whiter southeast. Armando and his badass wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), offend Ghirotti by refusing to be insulted. After Fátima’s mysterious death, supposedly from illness, Ghirotti hires two men to kill Armando. Meanwhile, he pulls the necessary strings to put Armando’s name on a list of people wanted by the federal police, which makes it impossible for him to leave the country. On principle, Armando resists the idea of obtaining a fake passport to flee. Being unfairly targeted by the regime introduces him to a whole network of corruption, oppression, and resistance. He comes to live in a building full of refugees with similar stories, each bearing its own absurd particularities. 

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971).

In 1928, the modernist poet Oswald de Andrade wrote Manifesto antropofágico (Anthropophagic Manifesto), calling on artists to cannibalize European techniques in order to make work that was distinctly Brazilian. Santos paid homage to anthropophagy with How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971), based on the true story of a late-sixteenth-century German adventurer captured by a Tupinambá tribe, which had made a practice of eating their enemies’ flesh. The filmmaker explained the concept like this: “The anthropophagic theory…is a theory of assimilation of foreign culture by the Brazilian man. And by the native. The native ate the enemy to acquire his powers, not to nurture himself physically. It was a ritual. The more powerful an enemy was, the tastier he was.”

Cinema Novo filmmakers anthropophagized European cinema, particularly Italian neorealism, whose depiction of desperate people conformed much more truthfully to the Brazilian condition than the glossy American model. Over half a century later, on the other side of both the dictatorship and Bolsonaro’s authoritarian, criminal, and ultimately incompetent regime, Mendonça Filho anthropophagizes the American paranoid thrillers of the 1970s to make something funny, sad, grotesque, beautiful, and truly Brazilian. From the film’s opening title card, which announces 1977 as a time of pirraça (mischief), it’s clear that Mendonça Filho is setting out to capture that thing, that ever-present sinister specter of Brazil, lurking just beneath the surface of beauty and abandon, across governments and time periods. 

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025).

The Secret Agent takes place during the celebration of Carnival, the most important week on the Brazilian calendar, but only once in the movie is it depicted as fun. Through Mendonça Filho’s lens, the street parties’ masks and costumes seem ominous, macabre: They startle Armando in his car and later sneak into his dreams. The visual language of horror films is everywhere in The Secret Agent, and this, too, is an anthropophagic move: Mendonça Filho transposes the tropes of the American genre film to a place that operates, day in and day out, according to the logic of horror. Fernando, Armando’s son, begs his grandfather—Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), a cinema projectionist—to let him see Jaws (1975), despite having recurring shark nightmares. (Recife is one of the only coastal cities in Brazil whose waters are frequented by the predators.) The excitement and superstitions around the Hairy Leg—a real-life urban legend cartooned and mythologized by the crime section of Recife’s biggest newspaper, Diário de Pernambuco, in 1975, and later disseminated throughout the region by radio journalists—haunt the atmosphere of the city. In the movie theater, Alexandre screens The Omen (1976), during which members of the audience faint and convulse.

This sense of the sinister puts The Secret Agent in conversation with Cinema Marginal and points to the enduring historical force of dictatorial violence. It contributes to Armando’s paranoia: that hair-raising feeling that you’re being watched turns out, for him, to be based in truth. Some say that trauma builds character; in Brazil, our historical trauma has built a dark sense of humor. Mocking the absurdity of daily life is a national pastime; laughter is a means of sublimating fear. The Hairy Leg is funny; the people fainting in The Omen are funny; even the malicious police chief, Chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), is buffoonishly funny. He is pulled away from Carnival festivities to inspect a human leg that was found in the gastrointestinal tract of a shark—the same leg will be stolen from the morgue, replaced with a beef shank, and returned to the sea, only to wash ashore as the Hairy Leg. Euclides is personally responsible for each step of the saga. In this early scene, he is covered with glitter and lipstick, the buttons on his shirt undone down to the navel.

Twenty Years Later (Eduardo Coutinho, 1984).

Then there is Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the matriarch in charge of the villa that becomes Armando’s temporary home, a safehouse for fugitives from the regime. Small, outspoken, and hilarious, Sebastiana has a long history of dissidence: She was a communist, an anarchist, and a member of the resistance in Italy during the war. Besides helping Armando navigate his new identity as Marcelo, Sebastiana sets him up with his upstairs neighbor, Claudia (Hermila Guedes), and gathers the refugees in her apartment for drinks, music, and a toast to the good things in life, as well as the bad.

Watching Maria’s performance, it’s impossible not to think of Elizabeth Teixeira, the peasant-league leader and widow at the heart of Coutinho’s Twenty Years Later. Elizabeth was imprisoned by the regime. When she was released, she had no choice but to entrust ten of her eleven children to the care of relatives, taking only one of her sons with her to Rio Grande do Norte, where she adopted an alias. Coutinho films the moment when her new friends and neighbors learn that Elizabeth—the sweet old woman next door—was a political leader, an activist, and a fugitive in another life. All those years later, some of her children are awestruck to reconnect with their mother. Others are left cold: She might as well be a stranger. The final scene in The Secret Agent strikes a similar chord. Flavia, a university researcher who transcribed the tapes of the resistance effort that placed Armando under Sebastiana’s care and tried to help him escape the country, gives Fernando copies of his father’s testimonials. Fernando (also played by Moura in adulthood) muses that Flavia has more memories of his father than he does. To him, Armando is only history, archival and abstract.

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025).

In speaking about The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho has often invoked the “logic” of Brazil, how “actions and ways of looking at society” that had seemingly been put to rest reemerged during the years of Bolsonarism. He is talking about a particular sociopolitical reality, but this logic bleeds through to our cultural lives. My friends from home are always daring me to translate exceedingly Brazilian things to my American husband. How to explain Nazaré Tedesco, iconic telenovela villain, the face behind the viral “math lady” meme? How to explain the concept of “mtg,” which remixes American pop songs to Brazilian funk beats? How to explain a place where every angle is workable, every institution corruptible, every structure malleable? In The Secret Agent, the Institute of Identification—where Armando has a job as Marcelo—is variously an archive of registration cards spanning generations, a venue for illicit sexual encounters, and—in a direct reference to the death of five-year-old Miguel Otávio Santana da Silva in 2020—a makeshift police station for a wealthy woman to give a statement about the death of her housekeeper’s daughter, run over in the street when her mother was sent out for milk and nobody thought to close the gate. This, too, is Brazil; it’s our jeitinho, a way of bending the rules to accomplish our ends. When Armando asks Elza, the leader of the resistance effort helping him to escape Ghirotti’s grasp, if what she is offering him is something like the American Witness Protection Program, she laughs. It’s like that, but in our jeitinho brasileiro: Less formal, less structured, less legal, more improvisational, worked out on the fly.

In the last years of the dictatorship, filmmakers had already started to try to make sense of its nonsense, with films such as Roberto Farias’s Go Ahead, Brazil! (1982), which likewise features an ordinary man caught in a conspiracy. But until The Secret Agent, the most widely seen and internationally acclaimed Brazilian films set during the dictatorship, from Twenty Years Later to I’m Still Here (2024), centered on active political resistance. They tell the stories of dissidents who were killed or repressed for their roles in the fight for a fairer, less absurd system. Mendonça Filho’s entry into the canon introduces a new approach to the era, centering the many people on the periphery of the struggle who were nonetheless targeted by the regime. His explicitly cinephilic approach Brazilianizes the American paranoid thriller while also referencing Brazil’s own cinematic history, memorialized in the opening montage: From musicians to actors, telenovelas to films, all the artists who have made our mischief so uniquely ours. 

On October 28 of this year, the Rio de Janeiro police entered two of the largest favela neighborhoods in the city and killed more than 120 people under the pretext of fighting the Comando Vermelho, a local criminal organization. The governor, Cláudio Castro, who ordered the operation, deemed it a success, despite the fact that the Comando Vermelho’s leaders were not apprehended, and despite the fact that there is no plan in place for the aftermath of the massacre, which has left hundreds of families bereaved. Times change, regimes are implemented and overthrown, presidents are elected then impeached, Carnival comes and goes, and we continue to ask ourselves: What kind of country is this?

1.      André Barcinski, “Quarta parade,” interview by Bia Guimarães, Rádio Novelo, episode 55, December 2023. Audio transcript. ↩