It’s a time of great mischief, and a man on the run desperately searches for his mother’s birth certificate. That time is 1977 Brazil, and under an alias, he works through endless rows of filing cabinets to find proof of life; she is long dead, but finding the document would not only prove that she existed, but in a way, that he exists too. It would verify the part of him that came from his mother, as a material witness to their history. That man is Marcelo (Wagner Moura). Or, depending on how much he trusts his company, he is Armando Solimões, his birth name, which he rarely speaks aloud. He is also a father mourning his late wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho), whose death is implied to be a political killing by the vile, buggish bureaucrat Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), who now targets him.
In Armando’s future but our present, college students go through scanned newspapers and listen to tapes that document his life, trying to fill in the pockmarked gaps blacked out from the historical record. They want to make sense of these archive pieces, to try to make meaning of those events that, until recently, were unavailable to them. The country was ruled by a military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985, and like many such regimes, censored what could be said about its history. Now, after the leftist politician Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president, it is incumbent on the young to read and remember.
Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, “The Secret Agent” (2025) unfolds a hauntological thriller that argues the act of remembering can be a form of resistance. Nearly every action taken, either by Armando or those who pursue him, demonstrates the cause-and-effect of who gives voice to history and memory, and how each may carry into the future. We feel it, too, in the somewhat controversial framing device, as the female student Flavia (Laura Lufési) obsessively uncovers incomplete versions of events we’re shown in full in the past. As she delves deeper to fill in those gaps, she becomes increasingly moved by the emotional spectacle of Armando’s life, and how it comes to signify a lost time that still echoes in her present.
Despite those cerebral themes and the gradual way Mendonça Filho brings them to life, the film has gone on to become a sensation. “The Secret Agent” won Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes, then earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best International Feature Film for Brazil, and Best Actor for Moura. Look at the comment sections of interviews and reviews, and you’ll see dozens (sometimes hundreds) of enthusiastic Brazilians celebrating their film and the international spotlight it’s received. Watching it, it’s easy to see why; like “I’m Still Here” in 2024, “The Secret Agent” brings to life a fraught period that until recently was censored from criticism. It’s also become tragically timely, as governments worldwide embrace authoritarianism and shamelessly manipulate the truth.
In “The Secret Agent,” violence and death carry an innuendo of silence. When the corrupt Ghirroti meets with two assassins to commission a hit on Armando, he demands that Armando be given a “hole in his mouth,” to “make him a dummy” –– as if even in the afterlife he shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Earlier, in what’s become an iconic scene, the film begins as our protagonist discovers a dead body covered in cardboard at a gas station. It’s to mask the sight of his carrion body, but it also leaves him as a “Fulano de tal,” the Brazilian equivalent of a John Doe. The police, who are busy with “Carnival,” a national celebration that in Recife gives rise to violence, leave it there, as if he’s not worth identifying. The body comes to haunt Armando in his nightmares–it’s an omen of the chaos around him, but also embodies his fear that he may wind up as another anonymous body. This nameless ghost may fade from memory just as his mother did.
Likewise, observe how often characters withhold where they come from and where they’ll go, wary of what a villain might use against them. The film’s central location is a clandestine refugee center that’s run out of an apartment building by the plucky, croaking Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who helps Armando get the job as an office clerk in the records office. Late in the film, all her tenants gather to celebrate their new identities and safer pastures, as they flee the current regime. Even amongst friends, few will spill their plans or even real names. Protecting your history may be what it takes to survive with dignity–– earlier in the film, the crooked police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) bullied the holocaust survivor Hans (Udo Kier) to show off his battle scars, excitedly believing him to be a Nazi. In this Brazil, the powers of the day can turn your story into whatever gets the cheapest thrill. As Dona Sebastiana laments, “it’s not easy to be called another name.”
Time and memory apply equally to “The Secret Agent’s” genre-film structure, where the winding and patient le Carré-like plot is so full of ellipses that the first half has been called unintelligible. It’s the kind of narrative where you trust the various arcs will slowly come together, and it isn’t long before these lacunae are filled. Thus, it’s only in retrospect, in our memory, that the full picture of Armando’s story may be understood. We learn in a long flashback narrated by Armando that Ghirotti sought to gut Armando’s research program at the university where he worked, and in a tense, belittling dinner conversation, viciously snapped at Fátima (Alice Carvalho). She dies after, most likely at the hands of Ghirotti. After a gripping chase sequence in which Armando dodges Ghirotti’s hitmen, we learn that Ghirotti successfully murdered Armando in a newspaper headline in our present; in effect, the audience must reconstruct the film’s narrative events in much the same way the student Flavia must reconstruct the past.
These two threads intersect as she visits Armando and Fátima’s son, Fernando, played in a self-reflexive dual role by Moura. He works as a doctor at a clinic that used to be the movie theater Fátima’s father ran. Fernando remembers little of his family, only the cinema and how much he loved “Jaws,” recalling Mendonça Filho’s documentary “Pictures of Ghosts” (2023), a torch song to the lost theaters of Recife. Flavia shares with Fernando all Armando hoped to preserve–details of his mother’s life, his life, and leaves a thumb drive with the archives, a step towards restoring a continuity of history that had been lost. Jacques Derrida once said film is a “magnificent act of mourning,” which “inscribes traces of ghosts” into the projected film. So too is “The Secret Agent,” a poignant reminder that though the past haunts us, remembering is how we reclaim our lost futures.
Have you seen “The Secret Agent” yet? If so, what do you think? Do you think it will win any Oscars on March 15th? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account and check out the team’s latest Oscar predictions here.
