One of the most lauded films of the year is Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (O Agent Secreto) – which picked up the Best Director Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and an award for its lead actor. Set in 1977 Brazil, roughly at the midpoint of a 21-year military dictatorship, The Secret Agent is a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a recreation of a time and place, with expressionistic and surreal flourishes that must be accepted on their own terms. The Brazilian public had to reckon with the reverberating traumas of a military dictatorship (supported by the United States, during the time period).
In the meantime, the nation’s cinema continued to reflect the passion of a people whose widespread pride in their endurance has only proven more and more poignant in a global landscape so willing to backslide into conservative chaos. As Brazil’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards in 2026, The Secret Agent opened at selected theatres recently and is featured at the upcoming Palm Springs International Film Festival. (For venues, dates, times, and tickets, see below.)
Kleber Mendonça Filho hails from Recife, in the north of Brazil, and many of his films have been grounded in the culture and history of Recife. After films like Aquarius and Bacurau, you might wonder why Mendonça made this film that is more than a conventional, tightly wound political thriller, but a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a recreation of a time and place, with expressionistic and surreal flourishes. The film hit selected theatres at Christmas time. It has been selected as Brazil’s Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Oscars and has been ushered into the Palm Springs International Film Festival with screening dates listed below.
For Mendonça, genre decompression is the name of the game, as The Secret Agent leverages the expectations of its generic-as-all-hell title to unveil the circumstances behind its designation as being entirely contingent on the historical suppression of Brazil’s historical tyranny. The longer we spend with Wagner Moura’s titular “spy” and unravel the details of his secretive undertakings, the more we come to learn that the man has simply become a victim of regionally classist repression under the thumb of a regime looking to snuff out the first line of defense against such forces: an educated public.
Wagner Moura stars as Marcelo, a tall, bearded fellow with gentle energy and sad eyes. He arrives in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco, Brazil, in a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle. We don’t know why he’s come to Recife. We won’t know for a long time. On the outskirts of Recife during the yearly Carnival, Marcelo pulls into a run-down country gas station to refill his tank. Nearby is a fly-strewn corpse partly covered by a sheet of cardboard The image evokes masterworks by some of the greatest chroniclers of authoritarian madness like Franz Kafka, Julio Cortazar and Luis Bunuel.
The attendant on duty tells Marcelo that the dead man tried to steal cans of motor oil the night before and was shot-gunned by the night clerk. Two cops drive up. They aren’t interested in the corpse. One of the cops “inspects” Marcelo’s VW Beetle, poring over every inch of the vehicle in search of a violation. Finally, he asks Marcelo to donate to the “Policeman’s Carnival Fund” in lieu of a fine. Cash preferred. When Marcelo is finally allowed to drive away, the film cues up Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now,” one of many seemingly counterintuitive soundtrack choices that burrow beneath the hero’s placid facade.
Right away, we’re under the impression that this man—our titular “Secret Agent” – is working on some covert, subversive assignment, but as Mendonça’s structure begins to unravel, Marcelo’s past dealings prove far more civilian in nature than one might initially anticipate. As he finishes his drive to Recife, the song and Maura’s eyes communicate the hero’s contradictory emotions: longing, nostalgia, fear. The rest of The Secret Agent builds on that brilliant opening. It’s an elegant nightmare. Corruption, disregard for truth, and indifference to suffering are common in this world. Whatever Marcelo is up to, we know he’ll need to stay hyper-alert for danger. He shouldn’t even be checking in on his young son, Fernando (Enzio Nunes), who has been left in the care of Marcelo’s former in-laws and lives in Recif
Marcelo is a widower with a small boy currently being looked after by his late wife’s parents; his father-in-law runs a cinema showing, among other things, Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Magnifique, the trailer calling him “the Secret Agent.” His father-in-law (Carlos Francisco) it the projectionist at what was a major movie house in Recife – one of the subjects of Mendonça’s documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023). Marcelo is not exactly a dissident, not precisely a political agitator or really even a leftist, but he does now find it necessary to get out of Brazil with his son.
Yet things are not that easy. In a previous life, Marcelo was an academic working in engineering who found that a minister with private commercial connections was ready to shut down his university department and transfer all its research, with its lucrative industry potential, to a private company in which the minister owned shares. The resulting quarrel results in the minister hiring a couple of hitmen, moonlighting from their secret police duties, to kill Marcelo.
Marcelo’s contact in Recife is 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a tiny woman with a sandpapered voice, introduced while walking down an alleyway, smoking a cigarette. Dona Sebastiana’s apartment complex is a safe house for refugees and the politically persecuted. Marcelo takes a job with the local government records office, but he appears to have an ulterior purpose there. Dona Sebastiana provides him with work in a government department responsible for issuing ID cards, ironically, considering the fake identity he is now working under. It is here that Marcelo hopes to find information about his late mother in the archive department.
Dona Sebastiana’s upstairs neighbor is a beautiful single mother named Claudia (Hermila Guedes). The old lady’s stories about Marcelo intrigued Claudia enough that she developed a crush on him from afar. Her casual fling with Marcelo is refreshingly adult and typical of easy sexual relations in 1977 – comfortably carnal and far from committed. The relationship also one of many story elements tied to absent parents or children. Some died of natural or unnatural causes. Others simply exited a family unit for their own reasons. Marcelo’s own mother apparently disappeared.
While at the office, he crosses paths with the corrupt chief of police, Euclides (Roberio Diogenes), who is dealing with the peculiar case of a human leg found inside the belly of a shark. Euclides’ problem isn’t finding out who the leg belonged to, but rather that he knows exactly who, because he was responsible for dumping the corpse in the water.
The local population, already shark-crazy with the release of the film Jaws, are electrified at the news that a shark has been caught with a human leg in its stomach – and the mischievous press spreads urban-myth rumors of a supernatural “hairy leg” hopping around at night, terrifying people and attacking gay men cruising in the local park. Somehow, we move from political violence into black comedy and mass hallucination.
Police Chief Euclides is friendly the hired killers with are in town searching for Marcelo, although he is not aware of why they came to Recife. He does not realize that Marcelo is living under an assumed name, racing to complete a mysterious mission so he can flee with his young son. The pair of hitmen hired to kill Marcelo, the gruff elder Agusto (Roney Villela), and his young and too-nosy partner Bobbi (Gabriel Leone), have a father-son dynamic even before we’ve learned any details of their lives.
At one point, Bobbi and Agusto turn to another deadly criminal to help them find and kill Marcelo: Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio), an angular, unhealthy-looking man with dark eyes and an air of desperation.
Mendonça’s richly detailed recreation of Recife in the late 1970s and the complex entanglement of stories threaded with very real political circumstances of the time are contrasted with moments of lavish surrealism. The defining image of the movie is the bloated, black foot of a corpse jutting from the leaking belly of a tiger shark, all piled atop a table in a school research lab. The fate of the leg is one of the key concerns of the film, and provides a darkly comedic through-line that merges cinematic reference, metaphor, and local folklore.
Sharks and legs abound. Marcelo’s son is beset by nightmares about sharks, and he compulsively draws his own recreations of the movie poster for Jaws, which his grandfather is currently screening. One among the many famous shots in Jaws is the gory flourish of a long leg, severed at the hip socket, drifting down onto the ocean floor. It looks an awful lot like the troublesome leg found in the belly of the shark, which, in most floridly surreal sequence of The Secret Agent, gets up and begins hopping around by itself, kicking gay men cruising in a public park. It’s a reference to the real, or at least “real” urban legend of Perna Cabeluda, the “Hairy Leg” of Recife, which is a popular bit of local folklore and a kind of half-joking unofficial mascot of the city.
The film savors every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale, including an amazing cameo for Udo Kier as a troubled German tailor with strange wartime wounds. The Secret Agent doesn’t have the imperatives of a conventional thriller but rather a more novelistic way of story-telling that gives breathing room for character development and a deeper look at Recife.
The Secret Agent screens twice at the Palm Springs International Film Festival next week: (1)WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2026, 7:30 PM – at Festival Theatres 1; (2) THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2026, 7:30 PM – at Festival Theatres 1. For tickets: https://psfilmfest.org/film-festival-2026/film-finder/the-secret-agent. Both are sold-out; stand-by is available.
