[HN Gopher] 'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent...
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'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025)
Author : tambourine_man
Score : 107 points
Date : 2026-03-17 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| anderber wrote:
| The Secret Agent was not an easy movie for the average movie
| watcher. It had an unorthodox ending, graphic violence, and it's
| in a different language. With that said, it's too bad it wasn't
| able to come out with any Oscars. I can see why OBAA won quite a
| few awards.
| dinkblam wrote:
| > I can see why OBAA won quite a few awards
|
| how can you see it? one of the worst AAA films in a decade, on
| every level including narrative and visual
| eszed wrote:
| OBAA wouldn't have been my choice for best picture, either,
| but it had some beautiful pieces of film-making. The long
| shot while running through the Sensei's safe house was great,
| and the car chase at the end was a) gorgeous, and b) visually
| not quite like anything I'd ever seen before. I can see what
| Academy voters liked about it, in addition to the "this
| director has been nominated so many times without winning, so
| maybe he finally deserves one" angle, which I think maybe had
| as much to do with it as anything.
| anderber wrote:
| Academy members aren't always good at picking "good" movies.
| I'd argue they're actually pretty bad at it. Every once in a
| while they guess correctly. At least my 2 cents.
| padjo wrote:
| What on earth is a AAA film?
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| The whole single A, triple A thing comes from league
| baseball. Single A was the lower leagues and AAA is the top
| of the heap pro ball. AAA denotes big budget tent pole
| productions. So big a studio could go bankrupt if it
| doesn't do well.
| padjo wrote:
| Ah so the OP thinks OBAA was designed as a big budget
| popcorn flick? No wonder they didn't like it.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Paul Thomas Anderson will tell anyone who will listen
| that he doesn't make commercially sound films. It's kind
| of his thing...
|
| They did throw some serious money at this film, though,
| so I can see where people would have strange
| expectations.
| kylebebak wrote:
| There's no such thing (parent likely borrowed this term
| from the video game industry)
| boogieknite wrote:
| when they said AAA i assumed it was satire
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It's very pretty, but the book is much better
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Bravo, palmas! etc.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| I had no idea about this! Thank you, I quite enjoy
| Pynchon's novels.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| The visuals weren't terrible, I thought, but the writing,
| dialog, acting (except for Moura), and narrative arc were
| terrible.
|
| It's one of those movies where almost everyone looks like
| they just really love being on stage ("isn't cinema lovely?")
| and where the writers have an idea of what cliches they're
| _trying_ to work with but can 't land them into an actual
| story, even a story made out of cliches.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Well I think there are some people that disagree.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| OBAA was technically well executed but, to me, pretty fucking
| soulless.
|
| I haven't seen all the nominees, but the ones I did see --
| Train Dreams and Sinners -- were, to our eyes, profoundly
| better films than OBAA. I'm in particular interested in
| seeing Hamnet soon; everything I read about it puts it in the
| same category as TD and S.
|
| OBAA was the safe Academy pick, and so that's what they
| picked.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| i thought Sinners was so overhyped. mediocre performances
| (great music!) and a terrible plot (why were the vampires
| forced to ask for permission to enter, and then able to
| storm the building a few scenes later? was there no better
| way to resolve that then just forget about it)
|
| loved OBAA (incredible pacing!) but had its flaws too
| cammikebrown wrote:
| Lemme guess... you didn't like how "political" it was.
| subpixel wrote:
| Quality is not really near the top of Oscar eligibility
| criteria now, is it?
| pearlsontheroad wrote:
| Having grown up in Brazil in the 70s, I thought the
| cinematography of "The Secret Agent" absolutely nailed the
| aesthetics of that era.
| forinti wrote:
| Kleber Mendonca Filho's other films are great at analysing
| modern Brazil.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Bacurau is one of the best movies I've seen in recent memory
| and Pictures of Ghosts tells an amazing story about the
| history of Recife's relationship to cinema.
| padjo wrote:
| Bacurau was quite a trip. I left that one pleasingly
| befuddled.
| aeciorc wrote:
| Neighboring Sounds is my favourite. It's the only movie I've
| ever watched that captures the psychology of living in a
| violent city: the mental load of constantly being in fear
| that something might happen to you, likely not today, but
| probably someday.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I liked Bacurau. The villains were a little stupid though. At
| some point after the brazilians mounted an armed resistance
| the americans basically gave up and started killing each
| other instead for no reason.
|
| Still an extremely subversive film for modern Brazil which is
| dominated by a brand of leftism that wants to disarm the
| population. Without weapons, the americans would have
| genocided Bacurau and literally wiped it off the map.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| One thing I noticed is that both this and another incredible film
| this year, _Sirat_ , were, at least in part, funded by a grants
| and state institutions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir%C4%81t
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent_(2025_film)
|
| If you haven't seen either, highly recommended. Don't watch Sirat
| if you're wanting a "good time," but I honestly can't think of
| the last time a film made me feel the way it did, especially the
| final minutes of it.
|
| _The Secret Agent_ is maybe as good though. Makes you want to
| say "they don't make them like this anymore.." It feels like a
| good long novel; every character, however minor, is rich, full of
| life, in some way beautiful. It's something about how the past
| has these pockets of clarity, bookended by loose ends and
| uncertainty. The mix of myth and anecdote. Pieces of life we can
| remember, those we can't... Five bags of popcorn.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Another movie that kind of slid under the radar but is very
| watchable (and mainstream) is Nuremberg. It's just entertaining
| without trying to be too much. It's not "great" but it's not
| bad, either.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_(2025_film)
| haunter wrote:
| Decent film but to me 'I'm Still Here' (Ainda Estou Aqui) was
| still a too fresh experience from last year to have a similar
| film again from Brazil set in the 70s covering the military
| dictatorship. I also think that I'm Still Here is a much better
| film.
| forinti wrote:
| I definitely like that film, especially the acting and the
| music, but I think that, as with most material that covers that
| era (arts, history, journalism), it focuses on the middle and
| the upper classes.
|
| The poor get a footnote: what happened to Zeze? But the poor
| were the biggest losers of the dictatorship. It was at the
| precise moment that the country needed to modernise that the
| coup made everything stop and the favelas grew along with
| violence in the periphery. Maybe City of God is a better
| depiction of what the dictatorship meant.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's just now starting to become common knowledge that the
| military dictatorship didn't industrialize Brazil. On most
| circles, saying that it deindustrialized the country will
| surprise every single person, and get immediately rejected as
| false by a large share.
|
| Propaganda is a hell of a thing. We are not even close to
| start that discussion, so it mostly won't appear anywhere.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Reminds me of the dictatorship in Suriname in the 1980s. It
| was not about ideology. The military was just corrupt- they
| even did business with drug cartels.
|
| Generals can't fix the economy they can only use violence
| and repression.
| calmkeepai wrote:
| The immersion into the time and place was fantastic, the surreal
| elements being bold , outlandish, and unexpected were great. The
| time jump at the end was interesting. a great piece of work that
| some felt divided over as a general audience but overall
| memorable and ambitious
| basiliobeltran wrote:
| One of the strongest movie start sequences in a while, it
| immediately sets the vibe.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I watched both The Secret Agent and One Battle After Another
| (didn't see any of the other nominees). For me, The Secret Agent
| was definitely better.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I found it unsatisfying. Such a strong opening let down by a
| meandering movie with no payoff. Made all the sadder by great
| moments and performances spread thinly through the 2-something
| hours. I remember coming out of the movie theatre thinking there
| was a really enjoyable film buried underneath the crud if they
| could have had more restraint in the editing room. To each their
| own I suppose.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Yes, I was a big fan of Bacurau and it works well as a fable
| but this one is very grounded historically and even with a
| basic knowledge of Brazilian history of this era I spent too
| much time wondering what was happening and why (even though I
| did understand everything, it's not cryptic either, just the
| rythm feels a bit off)
|
| Excellent aesthetics though but I am less sensitive to that
| andrepd wrote:
| Having no payoff _is_ the payoff. After everything that 's
| happened to him, he is killed offscreen and his son, now an
| adult, doesn't even quite remember him.
|
| The journey is the point, basically :) The scenes with the
| fellow "refugees" are great, insightful glimpses into Brasil,
| into that 1970s Brasil in particular. They don't need to lead
| anywhere in particular for me to enjoy it.
|
| That being said, I did like Bacurau and Aquarius more than The
| Secret Agent. But that speaks more to how _incredible_ those
| films are.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Fair enough if you enjoyed it. I'm no stranger to the period
| or the director's movies and still found this one overly
| contrived. The tense bits are so engaging that the
| fantastic/anachronistic felt like it detracted from a great
| story.
| knuppar wrote:
| yeah suddenly perna cabeluda was cool but it did feel a bit
| random :p
| forinti wrote:
| I interpreted it as people making up stories so that they
| didn't have to face the truth.
|
| Or maybe the newspapers used it to write about things
| that couldn't be written.
| knuppar wrote:
| > I interpreted it as people making up stories so that
| they didn't have to face the truth.
|
| That's a very plausible interpretation. I grew up hearing
| about this myth :p
| greiskul wrote:
| And the people attacked in the weird scene are people
| that tended to just be dissappeared by police. Gay men.
| Prostitutes.
| jsunderland323 wrote:
| I did too. It felt like there were a bunch of subplots that
| never ended up tying together. The leg was the most
| disappointing to me.
|
| My take home at the end was that it was supposed to show the
| audience that the story was recreated from the parts of the
| story that could be pieced together by the future journalists.
| Basically it felt meandering because it was meandering to the
| journalists trying to figure out what happened. The ending with
| the son was the journalist trying to tie everything together
| for herself but he just didn't have the information. Still
| dissatisfying.
| greiskul wrote:
| The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the
| region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist
| scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at
| night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc.
| People that during the dictatorship the police used to just
| dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.
|
| And it is meant to feel meandering cause that is how this
| period feels for people trying to study it. There are many
| cases that we don't know what happened. We just know that the
| people were killed/disappeared. The perpetrators were never
| brought to Justice. We are not even sure who the specific
| perpetrators are in a lot of cases.
|
| This is how the Brazilian military dictatorship operated.
| There are people in Brazil who want to go back to this
| period. They say that everything was better. The truth is
| that a lot of stuff that was bad, was so bad that we don't
| even have the records to properly reconstruct what happened.
| neves wrote:
| I've had the privilege to watch it at Sao Luis movie theater in
| Recife. The place is really a character of the movie. The theater
| was at full capacity. 10% of the public was with a yellow t-shirt
| that Wagner Moura uses for 10s :-) I forgot how good it was to
| see movies in a theater. Everybody laughed or clapped together.
| I've never more seen a movie with so much popular appeal. People
| seeing their lives and history in the big screen. If it had won
| an Oscar, maybe Sao Luiz would exhibit it frequently. Like the
| Casablanca theater in Morocco that just exhibits Casablanca
| movie.
|
| Pure cinema.
| ShamblingMound wrote:
| Secret Agent has a slow, difficult beginning (~hour). Not much
| happens. And it's not clear why what's happening is happening,
| particularly for someone unfamiliar with Brazil's political
| climate in the 1970s.
|
| As someone who's never been to Brazil, certainly not in the
| 1970s, watching Secret Agent still felt like being transported
| there. How did they make a movie that makes you feel like you're
| in a familiar place you've never been to?
|
| And then after about an hour, it picks up a bit more, and by the
| end, it felt like they directly transmitted to the audience the
| horror of the Brazilian junta in all kinds of subtle and dramatic
| ways. We don't see the resolution of the main character's story
| because that moment is lost. Memories of his life are fractured
| (through disjointed audio recordings) or repressed (by those
| closest to him).
|
| Hard to put it into words. I started out disliking it and ended
| up loving it.
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