In the Belly of the Beast: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent

Among the many memorable scenes in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)—terrorized beachgoers, Quint reminiscing about his naval service—there is a sequence in which Brody and Hooper examine the corpse of a tiger shark believed to be the culprit in the recent spate of deadly attacks. They cut the distended cadaver open in hope of finding the remains of a recently chomped local boy. But instead, amid a small torrent of seawater and digestive juices, all manner of foul-smelling rubbish spills from its belly: various fish parts, a dented beer can, a Louisiana license plate (it reads, in part, “007”—a sly reference to a certain secret agent). The image is grisly, but it’s a potent one, too. Here, in lieu of the evidence the police chief and the marine biologist were looking for, is a collection of detritus the ocean predator has apparently accumulated over the course of its far-flung travels. Trash though it might be, this assortment amounts to a kind of archive: mysterious clues about the life and times of a wrongfully accused shark.

Early in The Secret Agent (2025), writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho offers a kind of remake of this scene. A local police chief in Recife, a city in the northeastern corner of Brazil, is called away from a Carnaval celebration—he still has confetti in his hair and smudged lipstick at the edges of his mouth—and tasked with inspecting the body of a recently deceased shark. This shark is loaded with significance too, but this time human remains are discovered: a severed leg.

The year is 1977. Brazil is in the midst of a military dictatorship that began with a US-backed coup in 1964 and lasted for 21 years. It is, as a title card at the film’s outset informs us, “Uma época cheia de pirraça”—a period of great mischief. “Mischief” may seem a rather coy description for a period that saw the death or disappearance of more than 400 Brazilians, and the imprisonment and torture of some 20,000 more. But then there are many misdirections in The Secret Agent, myriad mysteries that offer clues to its very particular time and place, that comprise an archive in themselves. This is not to liken Mendonça Filho’s film to a bloated fish carcass. The Secret Agent is very much alive. We feel this in its sensuous colors: dusty oranges and lush aquamarines, which convey a palpable feeling of heat, of sweat on the skin. 

The Secret Agent has its secrets, but the film only reveals their meaning gradually. The first of these lies in the title, redolent of the sexy espionage thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s. This is itself a sly bit of subterfuge, a kind of assumed identity. Philippe de Broca’s Le Magnifique (alias O Agente Secrete or The Man from Acapulco, 1973), a Euro-pudding James Bond spoof starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, is playing at Recife’s São Luiz Cinema in Mendonça Filho’s film—but our protagonist, Armando, has no time to catch it. He has a mission of his own.

Played with suave insouciance by Wagner Moura, Armando isn’t a spy exactly, but he travels through the film under an assumed name (“Marcelo”) and is clearly hiding something, dodging questions from crooked cops and other nosy interlopers. We gradually acquire sketchy details of his life: a wife he has lost, his run-ins with devious bureaucrats, his hopes to flee the country with his young son, Fernando. He is a man marked for death, and the film steadily unpacks his story through flashbacks and chance encounters: friends and enemies with unforgettable faces, whether old or young.

From the start, The Secret Agent immerses us in the sounds and textures of Brazil’s Pernambuco region in the late 1970s. The soundtrack mixes the popular and the obscure, top-40 hits and deep cuts nearly lost to the flood of time: North American pop and disco classics by Donna Summer and Chicago fade into Brazilian psych-rock, tropicália, and udigrudi. These convey a sense of nostalgia, yes, but also a nearly ethnographic sensibility for Recife’s hybrid cultural forms that is also visible in the film’s fashions, architectures, and commodities.

This is less a fetishism of the past than a reanimation, one that also acknowledges the fleeting nature of things. Nothing lasts forever. This bittersweet recognition is at the heart of many of Mendonça Filho’s films, from his elegiac Aquarius (2016) to Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his chronicle of how much Recife has changed over the last few decades. In The Secret Agent, too, he reminds us that friends depart and old haunts disappear. But while the film seeks to recreate a lost time through period details, it also explores time itself—the historical along with the personal, the epochal with the quotidian. This is a film about an important moment in Brazil’s history, but it’s also a collection of ephemeral moments. A boy’s car ride with his father, a few drinks with some accidental comrades, sex in the afternoon: The film’s warmest scenes recapture little interludes lost to time, gaps in the recordings of the past, stories unfinished.

Of course, this is also a violent world, whose brutality is sometimes on the surface, sometimes deep in the fabric of life. The film depicts 1970s Brazil—in terms that feel curiously present—as a conspiracy of vulgar good old boys, corrupt right-wingers, who pilfer public money to line their own pockets and those of their fellow capitalist cronies. (The filmmaker and much of his team will know this experience first-hand, both as children of the country’s dictatorship years and as vocal critics of disgraced far-right ultra-nationalist Jair Bolsonaro, who was president of Brazil from 2019 to 2023.) And while the film often manifests the oppression of the 1970s in brief, gory eruptions—gunshots! dismemberment!—there are also tense interactions and a constant, simmering sense of humiliation and distrust. The threat of death seeps into each frame of the film in the form of low-level terror and paranoia, and anyone—a morgue attendant, a cinema projectionist—could be a snitch.

Still, The Secret Agent is also about how to find safe havens and trustworthy comrades in a mischievous time. Mendonça Filho’s sensitivity with actors—what they carry in their faces and bodies—proves useful here. Across all of his films, he has demonstrated care and curiosity with bona fide movie stars. This includes cinematic icons such as Sônia Braga (in Aquarius and Bacurau [2019; codirected with Juliano Dornelles]) and Udo Kier (in Bacurau and The Secret Agent), whom the director enlists not just for their star wattage, but for their physical presence, too. These are bodies with the signs and scars of age just as much as names on a marquee. Adding Wagner Moura to this roster, Mendonça Filho makes ample space for him to stroll through the frame, allowing us to soak up his charisma: the way he draws on a cigarette, the way he sips cachaça, and how well he wears his seemingly inexhaustible collection of tight-fitting, open-necked shirts. But just as remarkable is the film’s wonderfully varied ensemble cast, with professionals and newcomers alike. These secondary characters form a representative picture of a diverse Recife. Most memorable are the elders: Carlos Francisco as Armando’s humble but steadfast father-in-law, who is also a projectionist at the São Luiz; Tânia Maria as the chain-smoking matriarch of the safehouse where Armando takes refuge with several other dissidents and outcasts. Even the villains—cops and assassins—are as charming, despite being sinister.

Fascination with the messiness and variety of humanity is a clear sign of Mendonça Filho’s interest in communities and collectives—even temporary ones. His first feature, Neighboring Sounds (2012), mapped one such vital, unstable assemblage of people, portraying one little Recife neighborhood as a geographic, social, and sonic space all at once: a cast of characters, a collection of tropical-brutalist buildings interwoven with vines, and a symphony of barking dogs, music, traffic hum, and gunshots. In The Secret Agent, too, he pieces together various spaces and narratives, sounds and images, into a mosaic of the past. And the cinema itself is a temporary autonomous zone much like a continually evolving neighborhood: an architectural structure that brings strangers together for a collective experience for a short time in the dark.

Stories both fictional and factual, memories both personal and national, also draw us into strange, shifting communities. The film’s reference to Jaws, then, isn’t merely a regurgitation of a contemporary cultural signifier. It’s part of a larger pattern within how the film remembers, or possibly dismembers, the past: individual and collective memory, fragmented through circuits of pop culture, urban legends, and photographs. In the film—which, we should remember, is set during a time of aggressive censorship—local newspapers report wild fantasies of the severed leg’s escapades as fact, creating smokescreens for unpublishable accounts of police violence, while local cinemas cash in on the shark story with revivals of Jaws and stoke hysteria with Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). The Secret Agent explores this historical moment as a series of feedback loops between the cinema and lived experience, the fantastic and the all-too-real.

Reality, especially in a period of mischief, is often just as lurid as the movies. And much like a certain ocean predator, cinema feeds off this reality, devouring and assimilating everything in its path. Mendonça Filho’s films are emblematic of this tendency: They display an ecumenical appetite for stories, genres, and tones. From his earliest shorts, such as Green Vinyl (2005) and Cold Tropics (2009), Mendonça Filho often situated both intimate tales and weighty themes of history, nation, and class within the frame of popular genres like horror and science fiction. This syncretic tendency has been considered characteristic of Brazilian culture for at least a century. Inspired by the man-eating practices of the indigenous Tupi people, the poet Oswald de Andrade took up the metaphor of cannibalism as an artistic modus operandi in his 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago.” Later, this notion of an omnivorous cultural practice, mixing high and low and everything in between, attained new significance for post-1960s movements including tropicália, cinema novo, and cinema marginal. Rogério Sganzerla once described his film O Bandido (The Red Light Bandit, 1968) as “a western, but also a musical, a documentary, a cop film, a comedy (or is that slapstick?), and science fiction”—which could be a description of a Mendonça Filho film. Multivalent, capacious, and hard to pin down: Then as now, cinema practices a mischief of its own.

The Secret Agent is complexly layered and full of surprises. Even its most leisurely scenes are dense with sensations and details, and behind the winding, wayward feel of its story is a narrative of great intricacy. This is a film that rewards rewatching; moments that seemed inconsequential and offhand on first viewing accrue new emotional and historical weight. Another look is also an opportunity to relish every maneuver, every song, every face. As one old tagline for a Jaws rerelease reads: “See What You Missed the First Time… After You Closed Your Eyes.”

History, according to The Secret Agent, is a dangerous business: not an inert object, but endlessly alive, perpetually unfinished—often coming back for revenge or demanding a sequel. (In Bacurau, the history museum is the deadliest place in town.) Armando is mainly focused on the immediate present: Survival is his top priority, for himself and his son. But as he also searches for some record of his mother, now long dead—just as Mendonça Filho tries to locate the moods and ephemera of a half-century ago—the film demonstrates that the act of remembering can also be a strategy for survival. Cinema is a way of keeping the past alive, a place to ponder what may have been lost, what has been deliberately obscured or erased, and who, if anyone, will remember.

Leo Goldsmith is a teacher, critic, and film programmer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is an assistant professor in Screen Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, a frequent contributor to publications such as 4Columns, Film Comment, and e-flux, and a programmer with the New York Film Festival.