Wagner Moura in Intense Brazilian Thriller

An inspired streak of absurdism runs through The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) connected to an urban legend about a “hairy leg” that moves autonomously, causing trouble in the northeastern Brazilian capital of Recife in 1977, when the country remained under military dictatorship. The leg turns up or is mentioned various times — being pulled from the messy guts of a large shark carcass; stolen from the morgue and disposed of by evidence-tampering police; tagged as the culprit in sensational tabloid crime stories; and literally kicking asses in a gay cruising ground, where men are getting it on under trees or on park benches.

The rogue limb is a clever metaphor for the regime’s persecution of the queer community, among other groups, including dope-smokers, longhairs and anyone else who might be automatically branded as a communist. The entire scene is a brilliant comic set-piece, starting with the gorgeous sight of chonky capybaras grazing in a field at night before shifting to the park, where all that al fresco friskiness is rudely interrupted when the leg strides into action.

It’s the kind of bizarro detour you don’t expect to take in a period political thriller centered on a widowed father whose life is in danger. But moments of anarchic humor amid genuine suspense are exactly the kind of thing that makes Kleber Mendonça Filho’s fourth narrative feature such a thrilling original.

There’s also a conjoined-twins cat, with two faces on one body; a woman experiencing demonic possession while being helped out of a movie theater showing The Omen; a less perturbed gentleman at the same screening getting a zesty blowjob in a back row while poor Lee Remick gets whacked by her Antichrist child; a kid so obsessed with Jaws he has nightmares but is too young to see the 14-certificate release; and a shark motif that even appears in an old black-and-white Popeye episode.

Oh, did I mention it takes place during Carnival week, when revelers pack the streets by the hundreds of thousands and music saturates the air? But even that collective jubilation doesn’t escape the specter of mortality. A broadsheet headline late in the film reads “Death Toll of Carnival: 91,” as the pages are draped over the lifeless face of a contract killer in a pool of blood on a barbershop floor.

The magic of the film is that all these incongruous elements fit organically into the larger picture, without ever diluting the tension or undermining the life-and-death stakes for the central character, initially known as Marcelo. He’s played with soulful eyes and a cloak of melancholy and hurt by Walter Moura, in a stellar return to Brazilian cinema after several years away. He’s always been a good actor, but Mendonça Filho makes him a movie star.

Despite its humorous flourishes and droll characters, The Secret Agent is a deeply serious movie about a painful time in Brazil’s past, when people were disappeared in countless numbers, hired assassins haggled over rates, and even far-flung cities where the dictatorship was largely invisible felt its long reach. It’s both of a piece with and completely different to Walter Salles’ Oscar winner from last year, I’m Still Here, the main action of which takes place in Rio at the start of the ‘70s.

Mendonça Filho’s gift for exploring Brazil’s complex sociopolitical realities in idiosyncratic ways was already apparent in Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, and especially Bacarau, an anti-colonialist Western in which UFOs hover over a remote village mysteriously wiped from the map. But this new feature is his strongest yet and deserves to lift him into the ranks of the world’s top contemporary filmmakers.

The previous work that now feels almost like a companion piece to The Secret Agent is the elegiac 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, about the director’s childhood home in Recife and the now-vanished movie palaces where he found his calling. The seven years he spent making that film while poring over city archives is a significant part of the seed from which this new movie sprouted.

It opens with Marcelo pulling in for gas in his yellow VW at a middle-of-nowhere station, where he’s startled to see a dead body lying on the gravel in the blazing sun, only partly covered by a sheet of cardboard. He learns the man was shot by the night-shift attendant while attempting to rob the place, and the police are too busy with Carnival to come, though the stench attracts wild dogs.

But two cops do pull in, showing no interest in the corpse. Instead, one of them does a close inspection of Marcelo’s documents and car, looking for drugs, weapons or any kind of infraction. Finding nothing, the cop puts out his hand for a police fund donation.

That scene clues us in that Marcelo is already on the authorities’ radar. It also explains the urgency once he arrives in Recife to get things sorted and get out. The unofficial mayor of a tight-knit leftist community, 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria, wonderful), sets him up in an apartment and provides an envelope full of cash and details for a contact who can help facilitate fake IDs for himself and his son.

Marcelo’s late wife’s parents have been taking care of young Fernando (Enzo Nunes) while he’s been away. His father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is one of a handful of disarming characters, along with voluble Dona Sebastiana (historically the patron saint of death), who give the movie a buoyancy that works in lovely counterpoint to the corrosive fear driving the plot. Alexandre works as a projectionist at one of the movie palaces revisited in Pictures of Ghosts; scenes in the booth as well as posters in the lobby and outside provide a fresh hit of the affection for the moviegoing experience that was so intoxicating in the doc.

Only gradually does it become clear that Marcelo (whose real name is Armando) made an enemy of Ghirotti, a crooked federal official from Sao Paolo, who stripped public funding from the university research department he headed. He condescendingly tells Marcelo’s team to focus on work more in line with local business concerns, like tanning cow hides, and leave the sophisticated technological developments like lithium batteries to the more advanced experts in the southern cities. Marcelo has already patented lithium batteries, which doesn’t go over well.

He manages to hold his tongue during an uncomfortable dinner in which Ghirotti gets drunk and dismisses the Recife research team’s work. But Marcelo’s wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho), lets loose with an angry tirade that turns into a physical altercation. Marcelo has explained her death to Fernando as the result of pneumonia, though the suspicion lingers that Ghirotti might have had her iced.

The part of the movie in which Mendonça Filho jacks up the tension and gets to demonstrate razor-sharp genre technique comes when Marcelo is anxiously awaiting his and Fernando’s fake passports from a resistance facilitator known as Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), while two hitmen paid by Ghirotti, Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobby (Gabriel Leone), arrive in town to track him down.

The extended sequence where the killers get closer and closer to Marcelo is almost Hitchcockian in its tightly wound dread, made more agonizing by the raucous brass and drums of Carnival music. Perhaps the most daring trick Mendonça Filho pulls off is revealing the close of Marcelo/Armando’s story through a present-day Sao Paolo researcher, Flavia (Laura Lufesi), who goes through audio tapes of bugged conversations and newspapers from the time to discover what became of him.

But rather than cheating us out of a satisfying conclusion, it cuts a path to a profoundly affecting one when Flavia travels to Recife to share her findings with the now adult Fernando (also played by Moura), who runs a blood bank. That medical facility occupies the spot of a phantom movie theater.

Expertly chosen music gives a rhythmic pulse to much of the action in a 2-hour-40-minute film that never drags. The atmospheric score by Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves has exquisite passages steeped in mystery and sorrow, combined with an eclectic mix that ranges from the festive Carnival bands to international hits like Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” and Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby” to Brazilian songs of the period, notably a swoony number that Marcelo plays on the stereo when he first settles into his Recife apartment, which amplifies the emotion of his hometown return.

Shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses in the slightly saturated colors of film stock from the era, the movie looks ravishing, every frame packed with interesting details thanks to the expert production and costume design of Thales Junqueira and Rita Azevedo, respectively.

Enlivened by a populous, almost Altman-esque gallery of characters — way too many to mention — played without a single false note, and by the strong sense of a community pulling together for safety from the oppressive forces outside, the movie luxuriates in an inebriating sense of time and place that speaks of Mendonça Filho’s intense love for the setting. It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year.