Halfway between a political fable and the diary of a forgetful nation, O Agente Secreto, the new film by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, is much more than a period thriller. Set in Recife in 1977, during Carnival and under the military dictatorship, the film explores how history is constructed from the margins: in dusty archives, erased memories, and fictions that seep into reality. What begins as the chronicle of a man on the run gradually unfolds into a map of tensions where the personal and the political, the absurd and the brutal, overlap without resolution.

At the center of the plot is Marcelo, a man searching for proof of the existence of his disappeared mother. His journey through state offices, decaying buildings, and shuttered cinemas functions as an archaeology of trauma, an investigation into what has been torn from the official narrative. Forced disappearance—that silent yet effective technique of terror—becomes here the starting point for a reflection on the mechanisms of forgetting, but also on the forms of resistance that cinema can embody in response.

From the outset, Mendonça Filho distances himself from the conventions of genre. Though there are chases, murders, and underground networks, the film does not follow the rules of a classic thriller. Instead, it constructs a dense, kaleidoscopic atmosphere, where tension dissolves into long takes, seemingly inconsequential scenes, and gestures that lead nowhere. This emphasis on texture over traditional narrative may disorient, but it also creates a more sensory, immersive experience: a plunge into a Brazil marked by structural violence and institutional decay.

The constant presence of Carnival—with its colors, music, and chaos—serves as an ironic backdrop to a society where repression and surveillance are the norm. The contradiction is stark: while the streets fill with masks, parades, and excess, in the corridors of the State, decisions are made about who may exist and who must be erased. The film doesn’t aim to resolve that tension but to expose it with rawness and humor—like when flash-forwards show a group of contemporary researchers transcribing Marcelo’s recordings, as if we were watching a document found by chance. Is this story a carefully constructed fiction or a testimony recovered from oblivion?

Throughout the film, Mendonça pays homage to his hometown with an almost archaeological eye: the closed cinemas, movie posters for Jaws, the cars no longer in circulation, and the semi-abandoned buildings compose a portrait of Recife as a ghost space, where the past still pulses beneath the surface. In this sense, O Agente Secreto continues some of the concerns already present in his filmic essay Pictures of Ghosts, where he asserted that “fiction films are the best documentaries.” This new work seems to take that statement as a manifesto: rather than illustrating History, fiction here serves to dispute it, to fill it with questions, to unsettle.

Far from offering easy answers, the film dwells in uncertainty. Every scene, every subplot—such as the bizarre story of a severed leg circulating as an object of desire or irrefutable proof—calls into question the linearity of historical narrative. What seems absurd or irrelevant ends up carrying unexpected symbolic weight, as if every excess were a form of sabotaging the logic of power. In this way, O Agente Secreto becomes an imperfect but vital mosaic—an attempt to fix in collective memory what the State sought to erase.