The Secret Agent: interesting, stimulating and not what you expect

There are people who like to read film reviews before watching them. I only do it when I’m unsure whether the film is worth it. If I’m keen to see a movie, I try not to read anything beforehand so the surprise is as complete as possible.

And that keeps my judgment from being affected by earlier opinions that act as an anchor. But of course, what also happens is that sometimes you run into things you were not expecting.

And yes, when I saw the Cannes audience’s reaction to The Secret Agent I really wanted to see it, expecting a spy-and-politics plot Brazilian-style. But that is not what I found here. Suffice it to say that the title is ironic.

Even so, I found the viewing stimulating, but it also disappointed me a little, given the high expectations.

Not because it is bad, because it is not, but perhaps because of that Cannes reception, perhaps because its ingredients led me to expect something more rounded, closer in tension to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or No Country for Old Men and that is not what I found here.

Let me tell you why.

A political film, not a spy film

One thing should be made clear from the start: The Secret Agent is not a conventional spy film.

Yes, there is pursuit, there are secrets, hitmen, corrupt politicians and police, surveillance, fear and threat. But there are no spies. That makes it clear that we are not dealing with a classic genre thriller, nor with an action thriller.

It is more of a political thriller: slow-burning, auteur-driven and with “different” touches. A film with many distinctive traits, which may fascinate you or, as in my case, feel somewhat scattered.

That is perhaps the most important point in knowing whether you will like it or not: if you are looking for a direct story, with constant pace and the proven, closed structure of the great works of the genre, you probably will not find it here.

On the other hand, if you accept a film that places pieces little by little, shifts between timelines and prefers to suggest (a lot) rather than explain everything, it will fit you much better.

The best: Wagner Moura, the tension and the dictatorship as an everyday threat

Wagner Moura is one of the main reasons to see the film.

His character, Marcelo, is interesting and ambiguous. You never fully know who he is, what he has done, what he carries with him or how far his responsibility goes in what happened before the story begins. And that works quite well, because the film plays precisely at giving you information in fragments.

Besides Wagner, the entire cast is very good. Starting with its casting choices. Also, there is no sense of a film held up only by its lead, even if Moura is clearly at the centre. The plot works because around him there are characters — some genuinely attractive and/or curious — who seem to belong to a credible, dirty and dangerous world.

I also really liked how the film portrays the dictatorship. Not so much through grand political speech, but through very concrete details: people linked to the regime capable of doing terrible things, deaths that go almost unnoticed and a violence that does not always need to be underlined to feel disturbing. There is a very well achieved atmosphere of tension throughout the whole work.

In fact, the opening scene with the police officers and the cigarettes explains very well what awaits us. There is abuse of power, arbitrariness and a certain discomfort. 

Another scene that captures the film very well is the conversation between the two hired hitmen and the local hitman. A lot of truth in there without grandiloquent speeches.

In that respect, The Secret Agent does seem very powerful to me. When it focuses on political tension, paranoia and how institutional violence contaminates everyday life, the film has force.

The worst: too much length and too much dispersion

The problem is that it does not always stay there.

The film is too long. And I do not say that only because it runs over two and a half hours, but because I think it could have been shorter, and you can feel it. 

I watched it in two sittings, which helped. In a single session, it is quite likely to become overwhelming.

Because there are stretches where the pace drops and interest fades. You do not know what certain scenes are for. The characters help it avoid collapsing completely, but it does scatter. And that is where the director’s auteur touches, Kleber Mendonça Filho, weigh more than they should.

The black humour of the leg, for example, works. It has its point. I understand what it is aiming for and I would not say it is badly conceived, but in such a long film, with so many layers and open lines, it also feels like something extra. Or, at the very least, something that would have worked better if trimmed down.

I feel the same with some openly auteur elements: they give it personality, yes, but they also dilute the political thriller which, for me, was the most stimulating part.

Also, Marcelo works well as a character, but I would have liked the film to go deeper into some lines so everything could be understood better: the subplot with the mother, his wife’s subplot, the public university money spending… There are interesting brushstrokes that make it unclear whether the character is as clean as he seems, but I missed a few more traces in the subplots.

That lack of pieces fits the ambiguous tone of the film, so I do not see it as a serious flaw, but I did miss it at certain moments. The film suggests a lot, and that is fine, but some of those suggestions called for a little more development.

Verdict: stimulating, but less rounded than expected

The Secret Agent is worth watching, but it does not feel like the rounded work I expected.

It has personality, tension, a very powerful political reading and a magnificent Wagner Moura. It also has an interesting way of building the plot through jumps between present and past, letting the viewer fit the pieces together little by little.

But it is also too long, too scattered and less precise than it could have been. I think it would have been a better film if it had trusted less in its digressions and more in its core: the political thriller, the chase, the dictatorship and that constant threat.

As I say, I did not leave thinking it was a bad film. Quite the opposite: I left thinking I had seen an interesting and stimulating film, but very different from what I expected and one that, with a shorter runtime, would have been considerably better.

Technical sheet for The Secret Agent

Field	Data
Title	The Secret Agent / O Agente Secreto
Year	2025
Runtime	161 minutes
Director	Kleber Mendonça Filho
Main cast	Wagner Moura, Tânia Maria, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Gabriel Leone, Alice Carvalho, Udo Kier
Genre	Political thriller, drama
Country	Brazil / France / Germany / Netherlands