Review: Starring a Captivating Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent Offers Political Thrills with a Humanizing (and Sometimes Fantastical) Touch

Though his name might not be familiar to most, my ears always perk up when I hear Wagner Moura is in something new. He's been acting since the late '90s, but broke through (in a sense) in 2015 when he starred as drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the first two seasons of Netflix's Narcos. Moura's performance as both the most powerful and most at-risk man in the room over 20 episodes of the true-crime drama is riveting, and enough to solidify for me that his work is worth seeking out. Since then, he's appeared in The Gray Man, Civil War and plenty more, but he delivers a star-making turn in Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent, a film set in 1970s Brazil at the height of political turmoil and uncertainty.

I realized after seeing his latest that Mendonça Filho also made 2019's bizarre and compelling Bacarau, about a matriarchal community in an imagined near-future; though very grounded, there's a sci-fi bent to the film that surprises. The Secret Agent, striking as a fictional account of a very real time in the waning days of a military dictatorship in Brazil, finds one peculiar way to bring this sense of the fantastical into the proceedings and it's as silly as it is intriguing. We meet Moura—who is Armando...or Marcelo...or...it depends on who he's talking to—as he arrives in his hometown rather unexpectedly, a former teacher who's found himself in some political hot water. He's in Recife for refuge, which he finds with a charming if brash old lady, Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a sort of house mother to others in similar situations, including Claudia (Hermila Guedes), with whom he strikes up a relationship.

While in hiding, he's assigned a job at a local city bureaucratic office run by Euclides (Robério Diógenes), a spry, talkative older man who's got a read on everyone in his office and isn't always nice to them in exchange. None of it sits well with Armando, but he's more concerned with figuring a way out of his current situation and getting back to his young son, who's being kept safe with his grandfather. Under the cover of secrecy, Armando meets with resistance network members who help arrange for him to escape the country, even as hired gunmen are on his tail with a mission to take him out. As a political thriller, The Secret Agent is a gripping and engaging ride through twists and turns that make it essential one keep track of who's who and what their motivations are. And if that alone were the extent of the film's dramatic arch, it would succeed well enough.

Filmmaker Mendonça Filho, who also wrote the script, expertly weaves in a few additional storylines around Armando's journey that create a sense of place and time beyond what he's navigating. There's a crime story about a dismembered leg, and there's nothing more I can say about it without giving the juicy bits away or risk inadvertently turning you off from the film entirely, which I very much don't want to do. Suffice it to say it works, and it's an inventive way to incorporate some of the more complicated themes of the era. There's also a bit of a time jump, which, again, I don't want to give too much away on; it's this thread I found most compelling as the film reaches its conclusion. As the film moves into the present day, these scenes offer a profoundly humanizing touch to the proceedings, moving all that we've seen from an arm's length away, set in a different time and place, to something much closer to home.

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