Movie Review: Wagner Moura is on the run in Brazil, 1977, in ‘The Secret Agent’

You can almost smell the sweat in “The Secret Agent,” a stylish, slow burn thriller about radicals and mercenaries in 1977 Brazil. Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho begins his film with the note that it was “a time of mischief.”

It’s a sly kind of promise of what’s to come over the next 2 1/2 hours, where audiences will meet hit men, zombie legs, corrupt cops, a two-headed cat and a quiet man named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) who is running away from something — and into something possibly more dangerous. The film opens in limited release Wednesday.

Death is everywhere in Recife, where life has taken on a kind of surrealism as raucous Carnival celebrations drag on and the body count gets larger. Academics and journalists are being persecuted under the military dictatorship, and dissenters seem to often end up dead. But the music is good, the beer is cold and the shirts are buttoned low and haphazardly (if at all). The violence is casual and so is the sex.

The film opens as Marcelo stops for gas on the outskirts of town, where a decaying body is barely covered by cardboard. Flies and dogs swarm for a taste of the carcass, which the attendant says has been there for a few days already. The police have said they’ll get to it when they can. When a cop car does pull up, they don’t go for the body, however: They’re out to inspect Marcelo and his yellow Beetle. It’s tense and foreboding, a tone that is sustained for the duration. Like Marcelo, the audience is never not bracing for the worst. Thankfully it’s often punctured with humor and absurdity.

A title like “The Secret Agent” might make one suspect that Marcelo is some kind of slick operative in this world. The film teases out exactly why he’s on the run, why his young son is living with his in-laws and why some wealthy man has hired two other men to kill him, but he doesn’t seem like a guy with his own body count. Though he might not be a movie spy in the traditional sense, he is operating in this world almost as a ghost, changing his name and trying to live quietly in plain sight while waiting for the persecution to end. The understated performance won Moura best actor at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

There’s a whole network of ordinary secret agents in Recife, some protecting, some selling information to the highest bidder. The film is framed by a modern-day archivist listening to taped recordings of phone tappings and an interview by a woman, Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who is kind of a lawyer, kind of a preservationist — documenting a history that the newspapers can’t even cover in a straightforward manner.

One of the strangest threads is a recurring motif of a disembodied hairy leg, apparently a local urban legend, and useful metaphor in times of oppression. In one sequence, a woman is reading a newspaper story about how it attacked a group of gay men in the night. It’s brought to life with absurdist, gory glee, with the film turning into a B-picture scream fest for a few minutes.

Udo Kier, who died this week, also gets a memorable, upsetting sequence as a Holocaust survivor and local tailor whose scars the local police treat as a museum curiosity. The film is full of wonderful actors, including Tânia Maria as the godmother of the leftists in hiding, Carlos Francisco as Marcelo’s father-in-law, Enzo Nunes as his “Jaws”-obsessed son, and Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone as the hit men on his tail.

Mendonça Filho also returned to his childhood home to make the documentary “Pictures of Ghosts,” about the town’s classic movie palaces. In “The Secret Agent,” he gets to rebuild one of those vanished theaters and use it as a central location.

Like the infectious and haunting needle drops, from Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” to local hits of the time, “The Secret Agent” is the best kind of personal film, imbued with so many things that Mendonça Filho loves, both resurrection and elegy.

“The Secret Agent,” a Neon release in select theaters Wednesday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “some full nudity, sexual content, language and strong bloody violence.” Running time: 158 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.