The Secret Agent, the latest feature by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked gas station outside Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil’s northeast. It’s Carnaval 1977, “uma época cheia de pirraça”—a time of mischief, the subtitles tell us. For those familiar with Brazilian history, this places us roughly halfway through the country’s 21-year military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.

A man from out of town pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with boxes and suitcases. After parking, he notices something disturbing: a human corpse, barely covered by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summer sun. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot dead by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn’t expect the police to show up until Ash Wednesday. “I’m almost getting used to this shit,” he complains affably while wiping down the windshield.

The Secret Agent, the latest feature by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked gas station outside Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil’s northeast. It’s Carnaval 1977, “uma época cheia de pirraça”—a time of mischief, the subtitles tell us. For those familiar with Brazilian history, this places us roughly halfway through the country’s 21-year military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.

A man from out of town pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with boxes and suitcases. After parking, he notices something disturbing: a human corpse, barely covered by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summer sun. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot dead by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn’t expect the police to show up until Ash Wednesday. “I’m almost getting used to this shit,” he complains affably while wiping down the windshield.

Just as the stranger—played by Wagner Moura (a Brazilian superstar best known to U.S. audiences, unfortunately, for his sad-sack Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos)—is about to leave, a pair of cops shows up. They are oblivious to the body; their real purpose is to size up the out-of-towner.

This opening scene lasts 15 minutes and offers little in the way of exposition or payoff. The cops take off after claiming a paltry bribe; the fate of the dead thief is never resolved. Yet the scene sets the tone for the rest of the film, whose languid, painterly style allows Mendonça Filho to offer up a series of canny observations on life under, and after, authoritarianism. The theft, the murder, the looking away; a useless investigation that disappears when a bribe is paid; and, at the edge of the screen, a stinking corpse that everyone involved would rather ignore.

The opening scene from The Secret Agent.IMDB

In 1964, Brazil’s generals—with backing from the U.S. State Department—overthrew the democratically elected government of President João Goulart. Like the dictatorships in neighboring Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, Brazil’s ditadura was marked by censorship and the repression of labor unions and left-leaning political parties—not to mention the kidnapping, torture, murder, and disappearances of its real and perceived ideological enemies. In 2014, a National Truth Commission revealed that tens of thousands of........

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