"You get a masterful portrait of what that's like in The Secret Agent, an unsettling yet very enjoyable new movie by Brazil's leading filmmaker, Kleber Mendonca Filho. Set in 1977, near the middle of his country's two-decade dictatorship, this smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency."
"The superb Brazilian actor Wagner Moura who became famous in the U.S. in Narcos stars as a research scientist called Marcelo, an innocent man on the lam for reasons we only learn later. He heads to Recife, a coastal city in northern Brazil, to pick up his young son from his late wife's parents and then flee the country together."
"we also follow the bad guys a couple of hit men from down south and Recife's gleefully crooked chief of police, who's a blast to watch even though he's a monster. We keep waiting for, and fearing, the moment these villains find Marcelo. Adding to the craziness, Recife is right in the middle of carnival and a bout of public hysteria about a man's severed hairy leg that has supposedly come back to life and is attacking the local citizenry."
Set in 1977 during Brazil's two-decade dictatorship, The Secret Agent follows Marcelo, a research scientist on the run who plans to flee the country with his young son. Marcelo seeks refuge in Recife with Dona Sebastiana, a free-spoken septuagenarian whose apartment serves as a sanctuary for troubled people. The narrative alternates between Marcelo's escape preparations and the pursuit by hit men and a corrupt, gleeful chief of police. Carnival and a bizarre public hysteria about a purportedly reanimated severed leg heighten the film's surreal and tense atmosphere. The film blends suspense, black humor, and political cruelty with private decency.
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