The Secret Agent

Brazilian filmmaker and TIFF veteran Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers one of the year’s greatest films with The Secret Agent, a sly, genre-bending political thriller starring Wagner Moura in a brilliant performance as Marcelo, a technology researcher on the lam in 1977 during Brazil’s notorious military dictatorship.

The film begins with Marcelo headed to the northern city of Recife — the filmmaker’s oft-portrayed hometown — seeking asylum and to be closer to his young son. Arriving during the raucous celebrations of Carnival, Marcelo is welcomed by a colourful community of political refugees, yet an insidious atmosphere of surveillance, paranoia, and danger encircles him. Mendonça Filho spotlights corruption everywhere, from the sleazy local police chief and his ruthless deputies to the director of the state identification archives where Marcelo is simultaneously working, hiding, and searching for his mother’s official ID card.

Told in three parts, and toggling between multiple timelines, The Secret Agent reveals its plot in a puzzle-play of intrigue and information that reflects the ways in which truth is often concealed and memory contradicted under oppressive regimes.

The film functions as a précis for the authoritarian playbook. Yet, it is also a thrilling and pleasurable neo-noir steeped in Mendonça Filho’s love for and knowledge of cinema, with film references including Jaws (screening this year as part of TIFF Classics). The film was shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses and vintage camera equipment, replicating the visual style of the 1970s.

Winner of multiple awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and driven by a grim, hypnotic tension, The Secret Agent is essential viewing.

ANDRÉA PICARD

Content advisory: coarse language, violence, sexually suggestive scenes