Aesthetic Authoritarianism bores me: The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent (2025)  is the type of film that audiences should dress up for in their nicest tuxedos and dresses. It resembles a gilded restaurant promising caviar, artistry, and an exorbitant bill. Nearly every scene plays out like a curated surrealist painting, composed of gorgeous color palettes and meticulous cinematography. Audiences will certainly have their “oohs” and “ahhs” at the politically relevant themes served up like courses in a meandering tasting menu. But for a film that calls itself a thriller, it fails to keep viewers awake. That bill—two hours and 40 minutes—is very pricey. 

The movie opens in Brazil in 1977 during the US-backed military dictatorship, but unlike traditional political thrillers, director Kleber Mendonça Filho avoids framing authoritarianism as a constant crescendo of paranoia. Marcelo (Wagner Moura), an ex-professor fleeing persecution after defying a corrupt utilities tycoon, drifts through Recife with surprising ease. He settles into a community of political dissidents, meets with his son, and gets a job. The majority of the film is not unraveling some sinister mystery, but is about contextualizing Marcelo’s persecution and the disruption to his life. 

Filho flips the thriller playbook further with his take on violence and tension. He renders them both slow and discomfortingly quiet, with death itself becoming a casual pedestrian force. The film’s panoramic opening shot of a rotting corpse of a gas station thief buzzing with flies or two assassins throwing a corpse into the water indicates no sense of angst and no rapid musical score. Gory scenes of a leg inside a shark cadaver are treated so clinically, so matter-of-factly. The normalcy of it creates its own sort of horror, less overtly 1984 and more Brave New World—something is very wrong.

Tension and violence are not the only parts of the film that feel like a departure from traditional thrillers. Audiences envision that dark, claustrophobic palette typical of political thrillers, but instead, The Secret Agent promises warmth in a lovely tropical destination. The cinematography is luminous, filled with sun-bleached yellows and tropical greens. This beautiful visual extends into a nostalgic ‘70s aesthetic: classic cars, children playing football shoeless, and people sipping a cold beer on a sunny day. The long, single shots and the slow dialogue between seemingly irrelevant characters create striking realism. It feels evocative of a past when time moved more slowly. More striking than the violence itself is how beautifully Filho allows the world around to remain. This intentional juxtaposition of outward happiness and the subject matter of dictatorship creates dissonance and is a strong comment on the everydayness authoritarian violence can assume. Jackboots and rainy camps are a facet, but dictatorship smiles all the same in a loud floral shirt on a warm summer’s day. 

The film embraces the Latin American tradition of magical realism. Bizarre scenes punctuate the film like a zombie leg assaulting prostitutes. The perturbing part is how characters treat urban legends like this as believable. It is morbidly perturbing, but symbolically there is value. Just like in Camus’ L’Étranger, characters move through violence and loss with a sense of detachment, the absurdity of tales like the “Hairy Leg” offer insight into the mentality of the Brazilian people who increasingly grow numb to the violence. Absurdism here is an argument that Filho makes, an argument he has crafted thus far with every departure, that dictatorship shifts arbitrary violence into the banal. 

This commitment to magical realism does mar the film’s pacing. While it is initially thematically graceful, its symbolism eventually ceases to deepen the film and instead suspends the momentum altogether. Filho seems obsessed with building a textured world, rather than delivering a compelling narrative. Scenes of policemen bullying a Holocaust survivor or Marcelo’s Sisyphean quest for his lost mother’s documents can be valuable in their own right, but by then, the film’s thematic tone of arbitrariness, corruption, and violence is clear; there is no need for further reiteration. There is a certain baseline of action needed to maintain narrative propulsion, one that is not met. The one action-packed scene towards the end is brilliantly shot, but feels desperate. Filho panicked and finally remembered thrillers are intended to… thrill. 

The film has brief scenes that flicker to the present day, with a student exploring Marcelo’s story and meeting his son. There is a sharp contrast in color; the world we see now is ironically more fittingly film noir than the ‘70s: a dark, rainy Brazil with boring SUVs and Toyotas lining the streets. It almost makes you feel nostalgic for those violent ‘70s, a trap that reveals the political propensity to romanticize the darker pasts of authoritarian governance. Still, the scenes were awkwardly tacked on. They cut through the immersion as tense moments seemed broken up with jarring cuts to investigations of Marcelo’s case. Filho claims his choice to end the film in the modern era was meant to extend the continuity of his messaging, but it was a bizarre place to conclude the film—a lukewarm, slow ending to a slow plot.

The Secret Agent is multiple films at once. It tries too hard at too many things: magical realism, political film noir, and arthouse aestheticism. The long runtime is fundamentally linked to its flawed and overcomplicated vision. Nonetheless, the film offers nuggets of wisdom and beauty. The cinematography and situational immersion powerfully immerse you into a past zeitgeist and the inherent contradiction that is Brazil. Politically, it serves as a timely reminder to audiences that you may live in golden years, but authoritarianism is subtle and arbitrary. How truly free are you if a company can crush a whistleblower like the utilities company did to Marcelo?