The Secret Agent Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

The Secret Agent’s opening scrawl playfully refers to its setting – 1970s Brazil – as ‘’a time of great mischief,’’ a dramatic understatement for the world of this darkly comic thriller about a good man caught on the wrong side of a turbulent military dictatorship. The latest from Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho, it was the most awarded film at this years Cannes Film Festival and will be the official Brazilian entry to the Oscars.

University professor Alberto (Wagner Moura – Narcos, Civil War) arrives in the northern city of Recife, on the run, having got on the wrong side of a very powerful man. He takes shelter with Dona Sebastiana (a scene-stealing Tânia Maria) an elderly rebel hiding political dissidents in her apartment building and is given a new identity and job by a local resistance group. With his young son sent to live in safety with his father-in-law, Alberto is counting down the days until the two of them can flee the country.

Though he tries to keep his head down, Alberto catches the eye of corrupt local police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), who takes a shine to him and offers him protection, getting distracted from his own investigation into a killer shark stalking the local beaches and playing down a string of grisly murders that leave body parts lining the streets. Meanwhile, back in São Paulo, two bickering hitmen have been hired to hunt Alberto down.

The Secret Agent is a noir that is anything but dark and bleak. Filmed in gorgeous Panavision the Brazilian setting is saturated with colour and thrums with energy and life. The storyline is set against the backdrop of carnival, and little forays into the street parties punctuate the story – the police chief turns up to a crime scene covered in confetti and lipstick with no one even questioning it, a group of feather clad children scream and run at the sight of a dead body, a potential foot chase is terminated by a dancing crowd. The world-building as a whole is deliciously rich.

This is a terrific turn from Wagner Moura, a charismatic leading man only just starting to get the roles he deserves in Hollywood after a decade of excellent supporting work and even longer at the top of the Brazilian industry. While Mendonça Filho’s story takes some humorous and downright shocking diversions into fantastical territory at times, Moura keeps us grounded in the real human impact of it all.

Unfortunately, The Secret Agent does feel a little overlong and suffers from pacing issues. With all the side stories and plot diversions, we are well over a languid 90 minutes in before we ever find out what Alberto has done and who he is on the run from, with many of the threads suggesting enticing stories of their own, but really not adding anything to the whole.

A real rush of tense momentum is built towards the end as the delightful mishmash of dirty cops, professional hitmen and seconded guns for hire all collide with dangerous consequences – but that explosion of pace we’ve been waiting for so long for is then destroyed by a bizarre storytelling choice. The Secret Agent moves into a flashforward, where a present-day researcher is learning about Alberto’s story by listening to a series of recordings.

The ending is told via one of these sterile flashforwards, bereft of the characters and the atmosphere we’ve spent over two and a half hours building a relationship with. Like a bucket of cold water over the head, it completely sucks the audience out of the moment, killing any ‘thriller’ element.

There’s so much to enjoy about The Secret Agent, from its performances to its setting, gorgeous colour palette and cinematography. It is perhaps burdened with too many ideas, muddying the central plot, and I found the manner of its ending severely disappointing. Like carnival itself, though, it is an enjoyable chaos, its messiness and ambition are distinctly human.

The Secret Agent is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2025. A UK theatrical release is expected in February 2026

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