What Kind of Country Is This?: On “The Secret Agent”

The visual language of horror films is everywhere in The Secret Agent, and this, too, is an anthropophagic move: Mendonça Filho transposes the tropes of the American genre film to a place that operates, day in and out, according to the logic of horror. In The Secret Agent, the Institute of Identification—where Armando has a job as Marcelo—is variously an archive of registration cards spanning generations, a venue for illicit sexual encounters, and—in a direct reference to the death of five-year-old Miguel Otávio Santana da Silva in 2020—a makeshift police station for a wealthy woman to give a statement about the death of her housekeeper’s daughter, run over in the street when her mother was sent out for milk and nobody thought to close the gate. The governor, Cláudio Castro, who ordered the operation, deemed it a success, despite the fact that the Comando Vermelho’s leaders were not apprehended, and despite the fact that there is no plan in place for the aftermath of the massacre, which has left hundreds of families bereaved.