The Secret Agent: Kleber Mendonça Filho Turns the Country into a Subject of Cinematic Inquiry

Few contemporary filmmakers have observed Brazil with the acuity of Kleber Mendonça Filho. Over the past decade, his filmography has evolved from a collection of stories set in Recife into a sustained investigation of the deeper structures of Brazilian society. His films examine what often remains invisible in everyday life: hierarchies inherited from history, the mechanisms of social violence, and the country’s uneasy relationship with its own memory. Viewed as a whole, his work reveals a process of continual expansion — from domestic spaces to national history.

The journey begins with Neighboring Sounds (2012), continues through Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019), and finds its fullest expression in The Secret Agent, a film that deepens and brings together the concerns that have run throughout his career.

In Neighboring Sounds, his first narrative feature, Mendonça Filho creates an unsettling portrait of a middle-class street in Recife. At first glance, the film follows the daily routines of residents who hire a private security company. But its fragmented narrative, composed of a series of interconnected stories, gradually reveals an environment shaped by distrust and social tension. Brazil’s past — its structures of authority, inequality, and the legacies of slavery — hangs over the present like a ghost. Violence, the film suggests, does not reveal itself only through spectacular acts of crime or repression. It is also embedded in everyday gestures, small humiliations, and the silent hierarchies of urban life.

Four years later, in Aquarius, the director turns his attention to memory and the transformation of the city. Clara, played by Sonia Braga, is a retired music critic who resists pressure from a real-estate developer determined to demolish the apartment building where she lives. The private conflict points to something larger: on one side, the preservation of personal and collective memory; on the other, the aggressive logic of real-estate speculation. Recife emerges as a city in perpetual transformation, where progress is often built upon the erasure of what came before.

The political dimension of this vision becomes explicit in Bacurau, co-directed with Juliano Dornelles. Set in a fictional village in Brazil’s northeastern backlands, the film leaves behind urban realism for a hybrid aesthetic combining the Western, science fiction, and horror. The story follows a community that discovers it is being hunted by wealthy foreigners with the complicity of a local politician. The allegory is unmistakable: peripheral Brazil becomes a territory of exploitation, where domestic elites and outside interests collaborate to turn human lives into commodities.

It is in The Secret Agent, however, that these concerns assume their most complex form. Set during the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the film follows Armando Solimões, played by Wagner Moura, a researcher who arrives in Recife after fleeing a corrupt businessman intent on exploiting his work. The title might suggest a conventional political thriller, but Mendonça Filho quickly upends that expectation. Armando is neither an underground militant nor a heroic member of the resistance. He is an ordinary man caught in a machinery of persecution and violence.

That choice shifts the center of the story. Rather than treating the dictatorship solely as an apparatus of state repression, the film examines how authoritarian brutality seeps into everyday social relationships — into economic disputes, male rivalries, class hierarchies, and racial tensions. One of the film’s most revealing characters is Bobbi, a hired killer sent to find Armando. Shaped by family trauma and personal humiliation, he reproduces the violence he has experienced by outsourcing the dirty work to a poor laborer from the country’s north. In this seemingly mundane act, the film distills what the director has described as “the logic of Brazil”: a chain of domination passed down from the top.

Another element that distinguishes The Secret Agent is its historical dimension. The story set in the 1970s alternates with scenes in the present, in which researchers transcribe testimony from people persecuted by the military regime. These fragments turn fiction into an exercise in reconstructing collective memory. In doing so, Mendonça Filho touches upon one of the most sensitive points in Brazilian history: the country’s difficulty in confronting its own past.

The film’s conclusion expands that perspective further, revealing that Armando’s own family history reaches back to relationships of racial and social exploitation inherited from Brazil’s colonial past. The military dictatorship ceases to appear as an isolated episode and becomes part of a much longer history of inequality and violence. Authoritarianism, the film suggests, does not arise solely from temporary political circumstances. It grows out of deeper historical structures.

Taken together, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s films reveal a remarkably clear trajectory. In Neighboring Sounds, he observes the tensions of a single street; in Aquarius, he investigates the memory of a city; in Bacurau, he constructs a national allegory; in The Secret Agent, he descends into the historical layers that sustain these contradictions.

But that trajectory can also be understood another way. What changes from film to film is not simply the scale of the investigation, but the distance between the filmmaker and what he observes. The street becomes a city; the city becomes a country; the country, in turn, becomes an archive. The present begins to look like evidence of something older, as though every ordinary gesture carried within it a history that has never truly ended.

There is something archaeological about Mendonça Filho’s cinema. He excavates the present in search of the layers beneath it. What appears new often turns out to have an old structure; what seems individual points toward a collective experience. The violence of today may carry the memory of yesterday’s violence. The ownership of a home can reveal a much larger struggle over who has the right to remain. The modernization of a city can mean, for some, nothing more than the destruction of memory.

In this sense, The Secret Agent feels less like a departure than a synthesis. The film brings together the intimacy of Neighboring Sounds, the preoccupation with memory in Aquarius, and the allegorical dimension of Bacurau, while adding an even more radical historical consciousness. The past does not appear simply as something remembered. It is active. It is operating inside the present.

More than simply portraying Brazil, Mendonça Filho’s cinema seems determined to understand it — tracing historical continuities, mechanisms of power, and persistent zones of forgetting. Perhaps this is the most political quality of his work: his refusal to accept the present as natural, inevitable, or disconnected from what came before.

Ultimately, the question running through The Secret Agent — and perhaps through the director’s entire body of work — is not simply why a character is running away. The more unsettling question is this: what part of its own history is Brazil still trying to escape?

Perhaps the answer lies in the opposite direction. To escape, Brazil would first have to look back. To acknowledge what remains. To name the violence that has been normalized. To recover the memories that have been erased. And to understand that, in a country like Brazil, the past rarely disappears completely.

That may be the true purpose of Mendonça Filho’s cinematic investigation: to show that, in Brazil, the past is not behind us. It continues to live inside what we call the present.

Palmarí H. de Lucena

palmariescritor@gmail.com