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In the opening scene of the Best Picture nominee The Secret Agent, motorist Armando Solimões is pumping gas when he’s approached by two police officers. Despite the fact that Armando has been driving for days and simply wants to get to his destination in Recife, the capital of the Brazilian state Pernambuco, the officers take their time inspecting his vehicle. After assuring themselves that everything is in order, the officers ask Armando for a donation to the Police Carnival Fund, revealing the whole thing as an exercise in petty state corruption.
Just yards from Armando and the cops lies a dead body in the gas station’s dusty parking lot. Before the officers arrive, Armando talks about the body with the station attendant, who complains about the stench from the corpse, but also laments that leaving the pumps to dispose of the body could get him fired. As he and Armando chuckle at the banal horror of the situation, the attendant admits, “I’m almost getting used to this shit.”
In the nearly three hours that follow, writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho will fill The Secret Agent with all manner of cinematic absurdity and unchecked cruelty. As the gas station scene shows, that cruelty is often banal, something you can get used to… almost. But The Secret Agent also knows that powerful forms of resistance can also be found in the mundane.
Agents of Chaos
Despite what the title might suggest, The Secret Agent is not actually about a secret agent. Filho keeps the motivations Armando Solimões unclear until midway through the movie. Played with depth and charm by Wagner Moura, a Best Actor nominee, Armando is quiet, kind, and clearly exhausted. Yet, it’s easy to believe that Armando may be an agent given the heightened tension of the world around him.
The Secret Agent takes place in 1977, midway through the Brazilian military dictatorship that began in 1964, when the country’s armed forces—with the help of the United States—overthrew the government. Citizens live in the constant fear of those in power, people who oppress others for even the pettiest reasons.
Reminders of that power appear throughout the film, in the form of the body at the gas station or a severed leg found in the belly of shark. News of a shark with a leg in its mouth inflames the imagination of the public, who are just as crazy about Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws as everyone else in the late ’70s, but police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his men know that the leg belonged to a communist student they murdered. Euclides encourages increasingly outrageous stories about a severed leg attacking the gay community during carnival because it distracts from the real source.
Euclides also takes notice of Armando, who calls himself Marcello and has taken a job at the city identity office. Smart enough to know that Armando isn’t who he claims to be, but worried that he might be sent by a higher-ranking official with a grudge, Euclides attempts to befriend him. Worse, a businessman called Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) has sent a pair of immoral hitmen (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) after Armando.
Filho contrasts this heightened situation with absurd interludes, ranging from a sequence featuring a stop-motion severed leg attacking people to shots of moviegoers convulsing while watching The Omen. Yet, the most powerful moments in The Secret Agent or those that are quiet, unremarkable, human.
The Human Element
This rest of this article contains spoilers for the film.
About halfway through The Secret Agent, we finally learn the truth about Armando’s intentions. Years earlier, Armando served as the head of a science department at the Federal University of Pernambuco, which drew the attention of the industrialist Ghirotti. Not only did Ghirotti insult Armando’s wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) and express racist and classist views during his visit to the school, but he dismantled the department to increase his own profits.
After Fátima’s death, Armando wants to leave Brazil with his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) and take a position at another school abroad. But before he leaves the country, Armando needs to find files of his late mother, a woman who died when he was very young. As he puts it while speaking with a pair of resistance fighters who can help him leave the country, Armando is looking for “the only document to prove that my mother existed.”
The reveal is so subtle, so unremarkable that viewers could be excused for missing it. Armando may spend time with resistance fighters and communists, he may be a target of government officials and assassins, he may be operating under an assumed name and false pretenses, but he is no warrior. He’s simply a man who mourns the loss of his wife, who wants to protect his son, and who wants to remember his mother.
Such simple desires appear throughout The Secret Agent. Filho uses the movie’s leisurely 161-minute runtime to linger on people being people. Couples sneak off to have sex. Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who runs the refugee community, stops to listen to everyone from revelers to those suffering from headaches. In a touching but infuriating coda, the grown Fernando (also portrayed by Moura) speaks with a university student researching about Armando in the present day.
In each of these instances, we’re reminded that no matter how dangerous and nonsensical the regime may be, it cannot fully destroy the one thing that always stands against it: the mere existence the people.
Watching As Resistance
For most of us catching up with it during Oscar season, The Secret Agent is opaque and challenging, even when it’s thrilling. Filho’s eye for detail and penchant for surrealism makes the movie feel inaccessible for those who don’t understand the specifics of 1970s Brazil.
Yet, there are two things that every viewer of The Secret Agent has in common with those on screen. First, they are all human, and the passion, anger, love, and sorrow on screen connects us all, no matter how far away from Recife we may be. Second, we are watching a movie, and the characters in The Secret Agent are all cinephiles. They know that even pulpy stuff like Jaws and The Omen can create immediate, powerful reactions.
Those connections remind us of the work that The Secret Agent does, especially for viewers watching their own government become more petty, silly, and cruel. The movies show us human beings as human beings, they act as machines for empathy. And as long as there is empathy, no oppressive regime will succeed.
The Secret Agent streams on Hulu on March 1, 2026.
The post The Secret Agent’s Revolutionary Spirit Is in its Mundane Humanity appeared first on Den of Geek.
