The euphemism of a ‘mischievous time’ appears at the beginning and near the end of The Secret Agent. As the eye-catching symbol of a yellow VW Beetle recurs throughout, it’s a constant reminder that this leisurely crime drama, packed with its deceptively sneaky. It’s an incendiary and tour-de-force piece of filmmaking from writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho. 

With Brazil in the grip of military dictatorship in 1977, researcher Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) takes the long trip to Recife to stay at a refuge under the name Marcelo Alves and connect with his son Fernando, who has been living with his in-laws. As he befriends other dissidents, he starts work at a records office, intending to find the files to shed light on his little-known mother, where he inadvertently meets corrupt Police Chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his sons. The Euclides clan have been using carnival to dispose of bodies, a count that threatens to go up when two hitmen, one an old comrade of Euclides’, arrive from São Paulo to dispose of Armando, paid by the corrupt executive Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) who shut down Armando’s university research and insulted his late wife, turning him into a dissident.

In the past, it’s a febrile time, especially as Jaws dominates the movie theatres, and the discovery of one of Euclides’ victims’ legs in a shark fuels newspaper pages, conflating with the urban legend of the ‘Hairy Leg,’ a reference to brutal murders sanctioned by the dictatorship. In the present day, history student Flavia (Laura Lufési) listens to events through tape recordings made at the time, and uncovers Armando’s hidden story and fate.

The Secret Agent feels unhurried until it doesn’t; it unravels like a tightly wound portmanteau movie, recalling Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, as it pulls out a tense conclusion and thoughtful coda. It doesn’t have the distinct strands of Tarantino’s intertwining anthology or a blatant interest in arch crime comedy. But divided into three quite obliquely named chapters, it’s full of quirky asides, splashes of dark comedy and flashes of horror. Politics pervades everything, but is never blatant. The same is true of social injustice and the personal drain on all the dissidents we meet. 

For Armando’s part, he has recurrent nightmares that betray some guilt—a dead body left under card on a petrol station court in the opening scene isn’t allowed to stay out of our mind—but he’s also dealing with the sheer inexplicable injustice of how he ended up a fugitive when all he wanted was respect.

When he earns some respect, it couldn’t be from a worse source—the slimy Euclides, realised perfectly by Diógenes. It’s this connection that brings a punchy conclusion to the events of 1977, with dramatic bursts of violence, some phenomenally unexpected makeup, and intrigue. But Mendonça Filho can deliver information in shocking, unexpected, and contrary ways so effectively, thanks to the rich fabric he’s built over the first couple of hours.

Sr. Alexandre, Armando’s father-in-law, is a projectionist at a cinema—beautifully and heart-wrenchingly played by Carlos Francisco, who vies with Tânia Maria’s sublime Dona Sebastianano, and is no better than when he hears Armando recount the words his late daughter spoke about him. That great horror or suspense and hidden darkness, The Omen, is advertised in newspapers next to the latest murder updates; it plays in the cinema, where resistance leader Elza watches it before talking to Armando. A Jean-Paul Belmondo film titled The Secret Agent also plays on a screen. Armando’s son is fixated on Jaws, but not allowed to watch it because of the nightmares he’s been given by the poster (we’re later told it was watching the film, and caging the imagination, that ended those night terrors). Euclides enjoys taunting a German barber (Udo Kier hypnotic in his final role) and forcing him to reveal his bullet-ridden leg, never realising he’s a Holocaust survivor and not an escaped Nazi. Add to that the darkly comic disposal of bodies, and the way the leg reappears. The newspaper cartoons about the ‘Hairy Leg,’ and then a brilliantly unexpected sequence where the severed leg, washed ashore, comically comes to life, and starts attacking the citizens in the park (engaging in activities the regime wants crushed and the papers want to hide).

As we uncover Armando’s past, notably in the taped interview that’s crucial for the modern-day elements, which brilliantly don’t bookend proceedings, but overtake them with a cyclical flourish that connects characters and places, it’s delivered in brilliant restructuring. He told the story wrong, he tells Elza, correcting himself to explain that Ghirotti’s destruction of Armando’s life happened after an altercation in a restaurant where Armando’s wife insulted Ghirotti, and the researcher punched the businessman’s son. Through most of it, from the welling Taxi Driver-like chords in the score otherwise peppered with some exquisitely chosen needle-drops, to the moments of absurdist, Lynchian fetishism of a hopping, metaphorical severed leg, it’s Moura who holds the story as the broken academic.

His perfectly judged performance is capped by the actor doubling up, which allows Armando the perfect, if gut-wrenching, finale to his story. The way Moura holds together this film of mesmerising richness does indeed command massive respect.