# The Secret Agent Review: Paranoia in Carnival Recife > The Secret Agent is Kleber Mendonça Filho's sprawling 1970s Brazilian thriller, with Wagner Moura as a hunted man in Recife and a city alive with rumour and dread. Canonical: https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/the-secret-agent-2026-review/ Published: 2026-01-24 Last updated: 2026-10-02 Author: Kaiser Khan — Founder & Editor Language: English Review basis: direct-viewing Spoilers: none Editorial approval: 2026-10-02 Viewing confirmed: 2026-10-02 ## Verdict Yes. It is a rich, strange and gripping portrait of life under dictatorship, best for patient viewers who enjoy a thriller that takes detours. ## Is The Secret Agent worth watching? **Yes. The Secret Agent is a superb, generous and unsettling film, part political thriller and part portrait of a whole city living under a military dictatorship.** Kleber Mendonça Filho, who won Best Director at Cannes for it, fills his canvas with side characters, local legends and dark humour, while Wagner Moura gives a grave, magnetic lead performance that also won at Cannes. The reservation is length and looseness: at over two and a half hours, it wanders by design, and viewers wanting a tight chase will feel the detours. ## What is The Secret Agent about? [The Secret Agent](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/the-secret-agent-2026/) is set in Recife in 1977, during Brazil's military dictatorship. Marcelo ([Wagner Moura](https://celluloidscore.com/stars/americas/brazil/wagner-moura/)), a technology expert who has fallen foul of powerful people connected to the regime, drives back to his hometown during Carnival week. He wants to lie low, find a way out of the country, and reconnect with the young son he has barely been able to raise. He finds shelter among a loose community of people who, like him, have reasons to keep out of sight, while the forces that want him found are closing in more slowly and more strangely than a conventional thriller would suggest. Tânia Maria, Gabriel Leone and Maria Fernanda Cândido lead the supporting cast. Mendonça Filho wrote and directed the film, a Brazilian production in Portuguese that runs 158 minutes. ## Recife is the real protagonist Mendonça Filho has always filmed his home city with a documentarian's appetite, and here he recreates late-1970s Recife in loving, sweaty detail: cinemas, apartment blocks, police stations, petrol stations, the din of Carnival. The film opens at a roadside station where a body lies in the heat, ignored by nearly everyone, and that image sets the tone. Violence in this world is ordinary, public and bureaucratically unremarkable. What makes the film distinctive is how much room it gives to rumour and folklore. Newspaper scares, local urban legends and wry detours into the city's pop culture sit alongside the main story, and they are not distractions. They show a population processing fear in the only ways it can, through gossip, jokes and myth. The period details, from the cars to the film posters, feel lived-in rather than curated. ## Wagner Moura plays fear with restraint Moura, best known internationally for Narcos, gives a quiet, watchful performance. Marcelo is a decent, intelligent man who has learned to keep his face neutral, and Moura lets the dread register in small ways: a glance at a door, a hesitation at a checkpoint, a softening whenever he thinks of his son. It is a performance of suppression, and it gives the film its moral centre. The ensemble around him is wonderfully textured. Tânia Maria is a scene-stealing presence as an older woman who keeps an eye on the people under her roof, funny and fierce in equal measure. Gabriel Leone and Maria Fernanda Cândido add tension and warmth, and even minor characters seem to arrive with whole histories behind them. ## Where the sprawl costs momentum The looseness that makes The Secret Agent so rich also makes it uneven. Some digressions are brilliant; others slow the pursuit just as it gathers speed, and the film's structure, which widens its frame in unexpected ways, will strike some viewers as inspired and others as diluting. The thriller mechanics are deliberately low-key, so anyone expecting a spy film in the conventional sense may be puzzled by the title. Patience is rewarded, but it is required. ## Who should watch The Secret Agent? This is for viewers who enjoy political [thrillers](https://celluloidscore.com/genres/thriller/) with a strong sense of place and for anyone interested in Latin American history and cinema. Set aside a full evening. There are bursts of violence, some of it graphic, and a pervasive atmosphere of menace, but also a great deal of humour. It suits adults and mature teenagers. Where to go next: - [Bacurau](https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/bacurau-2019-review/), Mendonça Filho's wilder, genre-bending film about a community under threat. - [Aquarius](https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/aquarius-2016-review/), his earlier Recife drama, for the same deep feeling for the city. - [I'm Still Here](https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/im-still-here-2024-review/), Walter Salles's intimate drama about one family's experience of the same dictatorship. ## The verdict The Secret Agent is an ambitious, humane and sometimes darkly funny film that understands dictatorship as an atmosphere as much as a regime. Its length and digressions will test some viewers, but Wagner Moura's performance and Mendonça Filho's teeming, affectionate portrait of Recife make it one of the most distinctive films of recent years. ## Related title - [The Secret Agent (2026)](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/the-secret-agent-2026/) ## Editorial - [Editorial standards](https://celluloidscore.com/about/editorial-policy/) - [Report a correction](https://celluloidscore.com/about/corrections/)