The Secret Agent: ‘truly special’ Brazilian thriller barely puts ‘a foot wrong’

Set during Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship in the 1970s, this political thriller is “populated by so many characters”, you may despair of keeping track of who is who, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. But “do hang on in there”, as it repays the effort. Justly nominated for four Oscars, this is a “truly special” (if rather sprawling) film.

Wagner Moura (known for playing Pablo Escobar in the Netflix hit “Narcos”) stars as Marcelo, a widowed academic who has gone on the run from a pair of hitmen. Quite why they are targeting him isn’t initially clear but there’s a lot else to think about in the meantime: there is a “hitman hired by the hitmen”; there’s a corrupt police chief; there’s a “head-scratcher” of a sequence in which a human leg “comes to life and kicks gay people” (this is a reference to an urban legend; “Brazilians will get it, I was told”). It is, in sum, a heady mix, but it barely puts “a foot wrong”, and the performances are superb.

“If you’re expecting a Brazilian ‘Bourne’, forget it,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. “For a film about a man shadowed by two assassins, ‘The Secret Agent’ has a daringly languid pace” – it takes a full hour, for instance, to be sure who Marcelo actually is. And though there are “flashes of surreal comedy”, these belie “the seriousness of what is afoot” in a place “where evil comes with a grin and a cold beer”. Gradually, “a disquieting paranoia begins to creep into everything” until “even the sunlight seems off”.

At 160 minutes, the film does teeter “on self-indulgence”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent, but it is sustained by its “energetic camerawork” and Moura’s “soulful and seductive” central performance. “Few thrillers this year will risk this much, or land it so powerfully.”