THE SECRET AGENT Trailer: Wagner Moura Goes on the Run in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes-Winning Thriller

October 20, 2025

After taking the Cannes Film Festival by storm, where it won Best Director, Best Actor, and the FIPRESCI Prize, writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is one of the most anticipated films of this awards season. It stars Wagner Moura (his Cannes-winning performance) as a man caught in the middle of political turmoil of the final years of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970s, as he tries to flee persecution from an authoritarian regime. It also stars Carlos Francisco, Tânia Maria, Robério Diógenes, Alice Carvalho, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Hermila Guedes, Isabél Zuaa, and Udo Kier. Following its more recent festival runs at TIFF and NYFF, NEON has set the film for a November 26 release in select theaters.

Lead critic Chris Reed wrote in his Middleburg Film Festival review, “[Moura] shines in every frame as a man doing his best to oppose his country’s growing authoritarianism by living with as much integrity as he can… [Moments] prove engaging—including a few masterfully tense action segments—and in our present day we need as many examinations of the horrors of dictatorships as possible. Moura and the supporting ensemble give it their all, and the result impresses more than it doesn’t. What is left when only memory, if even that, remains, the movie asks. This is a vital question. Ambitious cinema need not be perfect to be worth watching.”

As the official synopsis reads:

Amid the raucous revelry of Carnival week, a widower named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) arrives in 1977 in Recife, Brazil, a city as vibrant as it is violent. A technology researcher who suddenly finds himself an unwitting target in the heart of the dictatorship’s political maelstrom, Marcelo is a man on the run from mercenary killers, from ghosts of the past and from the ruthless, mischievously militant spirit of Brazil in 1977. In the midst of these mounting threats, Marcelo, with the help of a mysterious woman named Elza and her compatriots in the country’s growing underground resistance, remains primarily focused on escaping Brazil with his young son. Master filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho teams up with renowned actor Wagner Moura – giving an extraordinary, career-defining performance – to craft a thrillingly unpredictable, playfully shape-shifting epic steeped in history even as it feels remarkably contemporary, paying affectionate tribute to the movies of Filho’s youth while unfolding against the backdrop of political turmoil and palpable danger.

See the trailer and poster below.