Meanwhile, a real shark washed ashore; The film's MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature's stomach. To investigate, the city's wily and pompous police chief Euclid (Roberio Diogenes) heads straight from his carnival feast, covered in confetti and lipstick stains, to examine the limb in the oceanographic laboratory, where he is joined by two other officers – his adult sons Arlindo (Italo Martins) and Sergio (Igor de Araujo). Euclid hopes to keep this discovery hidden from the press for reasons that will soon become apparent: a pair of hitmen, stepfather (Roni Villela) and stepson (Gabriel Leone), operate in the city with the tacit approval of the police, throwing bodies off a bridge into the sea below.
However censored the Brazilian press was at the time, disappearances are still in the news, including the disappearance of a student who has not been seen for several days – it is hinted that he is a dismembered victim – and is the subject of an article in the second part of the film Institute of Identification. The title refers to a government ID office where Marcelo, now neatly dressed and groomed, begins work in an office organized by a knowledgeable sympathizer (Buda Lira). Marcelo has an additional motive for working there: by exploring the institute's archives, he hopes to fill long-troubling gaps in his family biography. At the office, the story triangulates ominously: Euclid appears as part of an underhanded ploy to help a rich woman while denying justice to a poor woman. He is friends with Marcelo, even though he befriends hitmen during his nightly rounds.
Mendonça, fifty-seven, grew up in Recife and has focused his feature film career on the city, exploring its politics and power dynamics in the dramas Neighboring Sounds (2012) and Aquarius (2016). He made thematic digressions in Bacurau (2019), a futuristic fantasy set in a fictional village elsewhere in the state of Pernambuco, and Pictures of Ghosts (2023), a personal documentary about Recife's cinemas. Secret Agent is by far his most successful film to date and the only one set in the era in which he grew up. The film's physical design conveys delight, surprise, and poignant nostalgia; it seems to be equally rooted in memory and research, aesthetic imagination and political consciousness. By choosing period-specific decorative elements—Marcelo's yellow Volkswagen Beetle, manual typewriters in the office under plastic dust covers, payphones on the sidewalks surrounded by modernist kiosks that look like bubbles—the director embraces the fashions and music of the period without losing sight of the violent violations of the rules associated with them.
Mendonça loves process, and in The Secret Agent he draws out scenes, unfolding games of concealment and evasion with understated precision and overwhelming tension, delivering heartbreaking information with utmost restraint. His filmmaking is replete with memorable, eccentric details that have thematic significance. One of the film's most striking scenes is a curious digression stemming from a trivial telegram that Marcelo sends to a benefactor (Marcelo Valle) whose phone is most likely tapped. Mendonça shows the telegram at each stage of its journey: one clerk receives the message, another transmits it, a third prints it at the other end, and then a messenger carries it, folded between his fingers, to the office of a sympathizer. The oddly cheerful sidebar ends with a frightening surprise: the recipient is shocked to find that the telegram has already been opened.
Paranoia permeates the film, but there is no flashiness or bombast – no distorting camera angles, no intrusive musical cues. Instead, the ambient horror manifests itself in the cautious behavior of the characters in the crosshairs, as in two long and beautifully crafted scenes—the film's most powerful emotional pillars—in which Marcelo talks to other people under suspicion. In the first, he meets a woman named Elsa (Maria Fernanda Candido) in a secret place, who tells him that he is in mortal danger. He in turn tells her the story of his persecution, a story involving some of the authoritarian regime's predatory profiteers, while offering a poignant portrait of a former ally, his late wife Fatima (Alice Carvalho). In another such scene, the residents of a safe house hold a spontaneous support group meeting during which Sebastian, the matriarch, is asked about an old photograph on her mantelpiece and responds with an aria reminiscent of her dark, romantic political past.
