Weekend films

'The Secret Agent', a great, deep and committed film

Kleber Mendonça Filho's powerful feature film starring Wagner Moura arrives in cinemas

by Andrea Chimento

30 January 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

A destabilising narrative structure
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

One of the most powerful films ever made on the theme of South American dictatorships: this is how one can sum up 'The Secret Agent' by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, a film presented in competition at last year's Cannes Film Festival where it won two major awards, best director and best actor to the extraordinary Wagner Moura.

The latter plays Marcelo, a man who, during the period of the military dictatorship, returns to his Recife hoping to be reunited with his son. He arrives during carnival week and soon realises that the city is certainly not the safe and non-violent place he expected.

After the beautiful documentary 'Retratos fantasmas' (2023), Kleber Mendonça Filho returns to fictional cinema and does so by making Recife - his hometown - the real protagonist of the film again.

As in the previous 'Acquarius' (2016) and 'Bacurau' (2019), it is clear that Mendonça Filho's is a political cinema that, in this case, looks to the past in order to also reason about the present.

The first sequence is enough to grasp the dramaturgical force of this work, in which one immediately feels the presence of repression and the spectre of death as driving elements of a feature film that works on atmosphere and sensations, rather than on concreteness or didacticism that so many similar films carry.

If the beginning is dazzling, the concluding part is no less so - incisive to the right degree - in a product that is not forgotten after the end of the credits.

“L’agente segreto” e gli altri film della settimana
Photogallery4 foto

A destabilising narrative structure

The power of 'The Secret Agent', however, is not only dictated by its content, but also by a narrative structure that is always destabilising, capable of shaking and disorienting the spectator from beginning to end: starting with the character of Marcelo, the film continually moves in the territory of ambiguity, managing, also for this reason, to remain engaging throughout its approximately two and a half hour duration.

The Brazilian film industry has been one of the most interesting in the world for some years now, and this film undoubtedly represents one of the highest productive points reached by this nation in recent decades.

In addition to Wagner Moura, it should be noted that the entire cast works excellently, perfectly guided by a director capable of growing film after film.

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

An equally eagerly awaited auteur film is 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' by Kirill Serebrennikov, a dissident and strongly committed Russian director, fresh from two good films, 'Tchaikovsky's Wife' and 'Limonov'.

This new feature film recounts the years of escape of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, nicknamed 'the Angel of Death' for the atrocities committed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the collapse of the Third Reich and Hitler's suicide, Mengele managed to escape and took refuge in South America, where he lived for a long time in the shadows, moving between Paraguay and the jungles of Brazil.

The film is narrated entirely from the point of view of Mengele himself, offering a disturbing and complex portrait of a charismatic, lucid, but deeply ruthless man: it is this choice of point of view that is the most interesting aspect of a product that is incisive for much of its duration.

A few passages in the central part are verbose and redundant. With a few more cuts it would still have been a more effective product, but one is in any case satisfied with a film shot in elegant black and white and capable of delving into the darkest and most chilling abysses of the human soul.