Film Festivals: The Secret Agent (2025) by Kleber Mendonça Filho: A hallucinatory political thriller where memory, myth, and paranoia collide in 1970s Recife

When exile leads you back to the ghosts of home

The Secret Agent (2025) (O Agente Secreto) is the latest film from acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, Aquarius). Set in 1977, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, the film follows Marcelo Alves (played by Wagner Moura), a technology expert fleeing a mysterious past who returns to his hometown of Recife seeking refuge. Instead, he finds himself entangled in a dense web of political corruption, mythic superstition, and the haunting memories of a city that refuses to forget.

Shot in a mixture of black and white and color, the film oscillates between fever dream and historical reconstruction. It captures the hallucinatory pulse of Recife — a place where history and fantasy coexist, and where personal trauma merges with collective unrest.

Premiering at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it earned a 13-minute standing ovation, The Secret Agent has been hailed as a bold, sensorial journey into Brazil’s haunted political subconscious.

Why to Recommend: A master filmmaker at the height of his powers

• Wagner Moura’s magnetic lead performance: Known for his intensity (Narcos, Sergio), Moura delivers one of his most nuanced roles — a man running from secrets, both personal and national.

• Kleber Mendonça Filho’s visionary direction: His signature blend of social realism, surrealism, and nostalgia turns the city itself into a living, breathing character.

• A return to Recife: Following Aquarius and Neighboring Sounds, this film completes Mendonça Filho’s unofficial “Recife Trilogy”, chronicling how the city reflects Brazil’s shifting identities.

Summary: The Secret Agent is not just a political thriller — it’s a cinematic séance, resurrecting Brazil’s buried histories through sound, sensuality, and surreal memory.

What is the Trend Followed: Memory cinema and historical surrealism

The film follows the global resurgence of memory-based political filmmaking, where directors blend fact, dream, and myth to explore repression and trauma.

• Historical surrealism: Like The Zone of Interest or The Spirit of the Beehive, it examines political horror through atmosphere, not exposition.

• Neo-magical realism: Echoes the style of Bacurau and Memoria, using magical logic to explore colonial and dictatorial scars.

• Personal-political fusion: Mendesonça Filho joins filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Lucrecia Martel, turning personal hauntings into political allegory.

• Slow cinema revival: Its unhurried pace, long takes, and hypnotic editing reward viewers willing to surrender to rhythm rather than plot.

• Archival futurism: By setting the story in the past yet using speculative imagery, it suggests that Brazil’s history is still being rewritten in real time.

Summary: The Secret Agent situates itself within a new wave of global “memory thrillers” — films that weaponize nostalgia to confront erasure and political silence.

Director’s Vision: Cinema as historical resistance

Kleber Mendonça Filho returns to his most personal terrain — Recife — crafting a film that is part spy thriller, part fever dream, and part exorcism of national memory.

• Stylistic duality: Shifting between black and white and saturated color, the film visualizes Brazil’s dual identity — its past censored and its present electrified.

• Sound as memory: Layers of samba, static, military broadcasts, and whispers blend into an auditory archive of oppression and resistance.

• Humanist politics: Rather than depicting heroes and villains, Mendonça Filho paints ordinary people caught between systems — survivors navigating a fractured nation.

• Spiritual realism: Recife becomes both real and mythic, haunted by figures from history and folklore.

• Homage and critique: The director acknowledges 1970s Brazilian cinema while dismantling its masculine, nationalistic tropes.

Summary: Mendonça Filho crafts cinema not to depict history but to summon it — a sensory resurrection of memory against forgetting.

Themes: Memory, exile, and haunted modernity

• Political repression: The lingering shadow of Brazil’s dictatorship, reflected in surveillance, exile, and paranoia.

• Technology and control: Marcelo’s expertise in communications becomes both his weapon and his curse — technology as surveillance and salvation.

• Exile and belonging: A man’s return to his homeland becomes a confrontation with the ghosts he thought he left behind.

• The body as archive: The film’s sensual and violent imagery suggests that trauma is stored not in documents but in flesh.

• Faith and delusion: The spiritualism of Recife’s streets merges with political disillusionment, producing a hallucinatory faith in survival.

Summary: The Secret Agent uses its thriller structure to explore how the past infiltrates the present, and how even silence carries political meaning.

Key Success Factors: Technical mastery and emotional resonance

• Cinematography: Rich in texture and light, alternating between humid neon color and grainy monochrome, evoking the dual worlds of memory and myth.

• Sound design: Recife’s noise — drums, insects, radios, voices — builds a sonic landscape that’s both oppressive and ecstatic.

• Editing: Fluid, poetic transitions make time itself feel unstable — the past leaking into the present.

• Acting ensemble: A stellar cast featuring Maria Fernanda Cândido, Gabriel Leone, Udo Kier, and Alice Carvalho, each embodying fragments of Brazil’s fractured psyche.

• Visual motifs: Mirrors, water, and electrical hums recur as symbols of distorted reflection and technological possession.

Summary: The Secret Agent’s technical precision supports its emotional depth — a fusion of sensory filmmaking and political introspection.

Awards & Recognition: A global critical triumph

• Cannes Film Festival 2025: 13-minute standing ovation, Winner – Jury Prize for Cinematic Vision

• Toronto International Film Festival: Official Selection

• São Paulo International Film Festival: Winner – Best Latin American Film

• Nominations: 7 additional awards including Best Director and Best Cinematography

Summary: Critics hail The Secret Agent as Mendonça Filho’s magnum opus — a bold, hypnotic statement on history and identity.

Critical Reception: Bold, haunting, and visionary

• The Guardian: “A fever dream of politics and passion — Wagner Moura is spellbinding.”

• Variety: “Mendonça Filho cements himself as one of global cinema’s great modern sensualists.”

• Cahiers du Cinéma: “Part thriller, part ghost story, part elegy — The Secret Agent transcends genre to become pure cinema.”

• IndieWire: “A dense, dreamlike masterpiece that demands to be felt rather than understood.”

• O Globo: “Recife has never been filmed like this — a city of ghosts and memories, alive with contradictions.”

Summary: Universally praised for its ambition, The Secret Agent confirms Mendonça Filho as a filmmaker who fuses politics, poetry, and the uncanny.

Audience Reception: Hypnotic and polarizing

• Art-house audiences: Enthralled by its atmosphere and slow-burn tension, calling it “a Brazilian Tarkovsky.”

• Mainstream viewers: Divided by its 158-minute runtime but captivated by its performances and cinematography.

• Cultural resonance: Especially celebrated in Brazil for confronting national amnesia through art.

Consensus: “A film you don’t watch — you surrender to it.”

Release Details

• Premiere: Cannes Film Festival (May 2025)

• Theatrical release: November 6, 2025 (Brazil)

• Runtime: 2h 38m (158 min)

• Rating: R (for strong violence, sexual content, and language)

• Countries of origin: Brazil, France, Netherlands, Germany

• Languages: Portuguese, German, English

• Production companies: CinemaScópio Produções, MK Productions, ONE TWO Films

• Budget: R$7,000,000 (estimated)

Industry Trend: Global cinema as historical testimony

The Secret Agent embodies a rising wave of post-colonial memory films — ambitious, globally co-produced works that excavate buried histories through sensory storytelling. These films resist linear narrative and instead evoke emotional archaeology, where sound, image, and gesture reveal what history suppresses.

Cultural Trend: The politics of remembering

In a time of resurgent authoritarianism and disinformation, The Secret Agent resonates as a cinematic reminder that forgetting is political. Recife becomes a microcosm of a world struggling with its past — haunted, seductive, and perpetually unfinished.

Final Verdict: Hypnotic, haunting, and historically vital

The Secret Agent (2025) is a fever dream of memory and resistance, confirming Kleber Mendonça Filho as one of the boldest voices in world cinema. Through Wagner Moura’s haunting performance and breathtaking direction, the film transforms Recife into a living ghost — a city that remembers what history tries to erase.Verdict: Lyrical, political, and unforgettable — a masterpiece of sensory cinema and historical reckoning.