Feb 03, 2026
3 min read
The film, directed by Kleber Mendons Filho, has been nominated for 4 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor.
Oscar nominated movie Secret Agent 2026 plot and review
03 October 2026, at 09:00
The film, directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho, received 4 nominations, including Best Film and Best Actor.
Our journey continues among the top ten nominees for the 2026 Academy Awards.
This time, the spotlight is on Kleber Mendonza Filho's The Secret Agent, one of the most popular films of the season.
The film, which was screened in competition at the last edition of the Cannes Film Festival, made its mark by winning two major awards on the Croisette (Best Director and Best Actor).
The win was later combined with two Golden Globe wins overseas: Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor in a Drama, a recognition given to a serious Wagner Maura.
Bolstered by this journey, The Secret Agent now enters highly competitive categories with four nominations on Oscar night, which promises to be a particularly tight race for the statuette.
Secret Agent, Conspiracy
We are in Brazil, at the end of the seventies, in a time which, as a note at the beginning warns, is "full of strangeness".
The picture opens in a gas station, the sun burns, a corpse covered as best as possible with newspapers and besieged by flies.Then the main character enters the scene aboard a yellow beetle.A little later, two policemen appear: one of them has a blood stain on his shirt, a sure sign in a context where the police do not hesitate to use weapons.
It's a dry recipe, unsettling, that immediately establishes the atmosphere of the story.From here takes shape the story of Marcelo, a forty-year-old teacher running from an unresolved past, who arrives in Recife with the hope of starting over and reuniting with his family.
However, the city soon turned out to be far from the concept of refuge he had imagined.It is a place permeated with subterranean tensions, ambiguities, and potential violence.What emerges is a tense and fascinating story, where the balance is always precarious and the unexpected always seems to be hidden.
THE SECRET AGENT, THE AUDIT
A mad fort that is chaotic and very clear, a film that brings together dreams and nightmares in the same unstable territory.Shortly after the military dictatorship of the seventies in Brazil, he brings up a world where death is a daily and invisible presence, while stubborn life continues to manifest itself in a middle pressured by blind and arbitrary violence.
Kleber Mendonça Filho creates a disjointed, irregular film that deliberately resists any reassuring order.But it is in this seeming anarchy that the film finds its most authentic form, giving life to a frenetic and nervous story, imbued with a vital energy that offers no respite.The narrative develops in fragments, deviations and sudden accelerations, reflecting a broken state and a collective identity in a state of constant readiness.However, amidst this seeming chaos there is also a very powerful paean to cinema, which is understood not only as art, but also as a physical place where anything can happen.In this sense, Secret Agent is a kind of tropical and delirious New Cinema Heaven: Brazil hangs between dreams, nightmares and madness, where violence stops being just news and eventually becomes magical realism.
It is a world of conflicting and powerful images, in which fear is combined with celebration, horror with joy, and fear explodes even in seemingly light moments.Streets full of confetti and carnival remnants become mysterious and unsettling performances; bright colors covering open wounds that are still open, music and dance against the ever-present sense of danger.In these distorted, almost dream-like spaces, reality seems to dissolve, becoming history, hallucination, memory.
Madness is a pervasive state, the air we breathe pollutes every movement, every look.Here the film discovers its worst power, transforming the urban landscape into a symbolic place where history is moved by imagination, even violent, even immersed in a suspended and unreal dimension, taking on the appearance of a nightmare from which it is impossible to wake up.
The Secret Agent is one of those films that disturbs and overwhelms, but at the same time seduces and charms, leaving the viewer with the feeling of having crossed an unsettled, dangerous and yet irrevocably alive territory.
FORS GRADUATION
The feeling surrounding ``The Secret Agent'' is that while the film's quality is undeniable, it will essentially be left empty by the Oscar ceremony.In the most popular category, Best Film, the chances of winning appear to be very limited, as is the Best Casting category.The only two concrete possibilities are Best Foreign Film and Best Actor, even though Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value seems to have started with a slight head start (although Timothée Chalamet appears to be practically in pole position for this statuette at the moment).
It is not at all trivial to admit that for a film of this scope and style it is a great victory to be the main character with four Oscar nominations.
