The Secret Agent 2025

A heartbreaking work of staggering beauty and intensity. If the Oscars get it right with their oncoming onslaught of glamour and bad taste, then Wagner Moura will walk off with the best actor Oscar, but I'm not holding my breath. This is the 3rd time I've seen him act. His most famous role is his intense on going part in “Narcos” that harsh series in which he played Pablo Escobar.

I also caught him in an early film from 2014 “Futuro Beach” in which he plays a young gay man who works as a lifeguard and gets involved with a German tourist who becomes his longtime lover. His recent appearance in”The Secret Agent” takes place in the past of 1977 when Brazil is under the long and violent arm of their long military dictatorship that took place from 1964 to 1985.

The film's title brought up for me The 1930's Alfred Hitchcock film about spies and yes secret agents, but don't let the title mislead you as it has nothing to do with the Hitchcock film or the short stories by W. Somerset

Maugham that it was based on.

Moura plays a widowed research professor with a young son who is being hounded by the fascists and he has to get himself and his charming young son out of the country. That is basically the plot, but this is a long film and there is a lot of meat on its bones that brings together all the horror of a brutal dictatorship along with moments of surreal and deadly humor, that mainly involves a severed foot found in the belly of a shark.

Sharks both human and the other kind are also here, especially in the references to “Jaws” the movie that is playing in one of the big movie palaces that is operated by Moura's father in law, and is the one movie that his young child is possessed by, begging his father and grandfather to allow him to see it, and even doing many drawings based on the movie ads that he gets inspiration from. This is a wonderful touch and Kleber Mendonca Filho who did a marvelous documentary called “Pictures of Ghosts” about his childhood memories of the many movie palaces that filled his youth in his home town of Recife, which is also the city that The Secret Agent takes place in and these palaces are also referenced in this film.

This is not an easy film, its nearly 3 hours, it jumps back and forth between the present, and the past and its politics will not sit easy with the average American viewer who wants their guts and glory preferably under 2 hours. However for the rest of us, this is an unnerving look at what happens when countries are taken over by harsh fascistic dictators and the thousands of lives that they destroy. From its shocking opening to its final sad ending this is a film that will stay with me for a long time. One of the ten best films of 2025.