Presented in Official Competition, “THE SECRET AGENT” by Kleber Mendonça Filho stands as one of the year’s major political works. Beneath the surface of a historical thriller set in 1970s Brazil, the filmmaker delivers a deeply contemporary film whose resonance extends far beyond the country’s military dictatorship.

The film follows Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a former professor forced to live under a false identity to escape the regime’s repressive machinery. Brazil is in the grip of military rule: constant surveillance, arbitrary arrests, disappearances. Yet Mendonça Filho does not merely depict a bygone era — he examines a mechanism.

What “THE SECRET AGENT” reveals, with almost clinical precision, is how a state can gradually transform security into control, protection into generalized suspicion, as fear becomes a political tool. Bodies abandoned along the roadside no longer provoke outrage; they become part of the landscape, part of everyday life. People get used to them.

And that is where the film becomes unsettling: Brazil’s past turns into a mirror of its present. In reconstructing the 1970s, the director seeks neither nostalgia nor didacticism. Instead, he invites reflection, allowing us to glimpse the realities of today through the “mirror” of the past. Surveillance logic, ideological polarization, the delegitimization of opponents — these dynamics may belong to an earlier dictatorship, but they echo powerfully in the present.

In a world marked by the rise of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of extremism, and the expansion of surveillance technologies, “THE SECRET AGENT” acts as a quiet reminder: no democracy is permanently secured.

Without ever explicitly referencing Brazil’s recent political developments, the film engages in dialogue with them. It reminds us that institutions are fragile, that violence can become banal, and that a society can grow accustomed to the unacceptable.

In this context, the intimate becomes the only battleground.

What is most striking is that Marcelo is not a revolutionary hero. He does not seek to overthrow the regime. He is simply trying to survive — and to protect his son. He wants only to preserve a fragment of humanity within a system determined to crush him.

The film’s great strength lies in this intimate dimension: politics is never abstract. It infiltrates families, relationships, silences. It transforms identities into liabilities and personal choices into potentially dangerous acts.

In this sense, “THE SECRET AGENT” transcends its historical framework. It shows that, across all latitudes and eras, collective history ultimately inscribes itself onto individual destinies.

The film’s most powerful metaphor for a fragile society is Carnival — a social ritual that, since antiquity, has masked reality behind grotesque faces and absurd costumes. In The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade wrote: “The abolition of elapsed ‘profane time’ was effected through rites signifying a kind of ‘end of the world’… Then the dead could return, for all barriers between the living and the dead were broken; at that paradoxical moment, time would be suspended, and they could once again be contemporaries of the living.” This suspension of time finds a particular echo in Carnival traditions.

Carnival, omnipresent in the film, connects past and present. A dazzling celebration of music and color — yet behind the masks, tension simmers. Collective joy becomes almost unsettling, as if the country were dancing at the edge of a precipice. The vibrant spectacle becomes the stage for a terrifying paradox.

The image resonates strongly with our own era: a society saturated with spectacle, images, and celebration, yet fractured by loneliness and distrust — an ambivalence Mendonça Filho captures with remarkable acuity.

At 2 hours and 40 minutes, with its layered narrative and shifting registers — from political noir to intimate drama — “THE SECRET AGENT” demands the viewer’s full attention.

This is not merely a film about Brazil’s dictatorship. It is a film about the fragility of freedoms, about collective memory, and about the insidious mechanisms through which a society can slide toward authoritarianism.

At Cannes, it left a lasting impression not because it reconstructs the past, but because it speaks — with troubling clarity — to the present.

“THE SECRET AGENT” is not a period piece. It is a warning.