Kleber Mendonça Filho makes politically charged dramas that draw their power from the everyday, letting ordinary Brazilian life tighten with the slow, simmering tension of a thriller. His films lay bare the class rifts and quiet violences embedded in the country's social fabric.
Over the past two decades, Mendonça Filho has carved out one of Brazil's most distinctive filmographies, moving between intimate social dramas and genre-inflected political thrillers. From the apartment-block unrest of Neighboring Sounds (2012) to the anti-colonial fable of Bacurau (2019), his career is an ever-sharpening critique of power, approached with a documentarian's attention to detail.
The Secret Agent (2025), Mendonça Filho's fourth feature film, hits theaters across the United States on November 26. (Visit the film's official site, via distributor Neon, for locations and showtimes.) Set in 1977, this taut thriller explores how violence was normalized under the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The film earned Mendonça Filho a Best Director prize at Cannes. It lands with unmistakable contemporary resonance, a reminder of how state power embeds itself in the fabric of ordinary life.
Born in Recife, Brazil in 1968, Mendonça Filho completed a degree in journalism at the Federal University of Pernambuco. From there, he began writing film criticism for publications such as Cinética and Continente. His first feature film, Crítico (2008), grew directly out of those years, a wry, self-reflexive study of the uneasy push-and-pull between filmmakers and the critics who appraise them.
Over the years, Mendonça Filho built his voice through a string of inventive short films released by his production company CinemaScópio. His first, Enjaulado (1997), told the story of a paranoid middle-class man. This was followed by A Menina do Algodão (2002), Vinil Verde (2004), Eletrodoméstica (2005), Noite de Sexta Manhã de Sábado (2006), and Recife Frio (2009), each of which sharpened his focus on the textures of everyday Brazilian life.
But his breakout came with Neighboring Sounds. The director's debut won awards throughout Brazil and was submitted as Brazil's entry for the 86th Academy Awards. Just seven years later, Bacurau, his third feature, won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019. From there, he shifted toward a more reflective mode with Pictures of Ghosts, a documentary essay that excavates Recife's old movie theaters -- and, in the process, the personal and collective histories that shaped his cinematic imagination.
"It was only when I reconnected my childhood memories with the hard facts, looking at old newspapers and films, that I felt I had the emotional background to write The Secret Agent, and to think about what details would make the film interesting as a reconstruction of the time," Mendonça Filho told Metrograph Journal in a recent interview.
For this edition of Playback, I'm rolling back the tape on Mendonça Filho's filmography, whose compact filmography delivers some of the most trenchant and disconcerting political commentary today.
Neighboring Sounds (2012)
A quiet Recife neighborhood begins to throb with paranoia in Mendonça Filho's uncanny, slow-burning debut, Neighboring Sounds (2012)
The film unfolds in Mendonça Filho's hometown of Recife, where he narrows his focus to the rhythms of a middle-class block. At its center is João (Gustavo Jahn), a young real-estate broker whose family has held quiet, generational influence over the street. When a private security firm arrives -- led by the charismatic but vaguely menacing Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) -- the calm begins to crack. Small frictions between the neighbors are fueled by class anxiety, slowly tainting the sanity of the neighborhood.
This striking debut put Mendonça Filho on the map immediately, called out by A.O. Scott of The New York Times as one of the best films of 2012. It established the director's voice, a mix of social critique and domestic unease refracted through his own memory and hometown.
Aquarius (2016)
In Aquarius (2016), a retired music critic refuses to surrender her home, turning one woman's apartment into a battleground for memory and autonomy in this parable of class power.
Clara (Sônia Braga), a widowed former journalist and critic, is the last resident of the Aquarius building, which a development firm is determined to empty and demolish. As the company's young executive, Diego (Humberto Carrão), escalates harassment tactics, Clara digs in. The conflict is a personal war over history: her own, and the city's. This character study stands as a firm beacon of resistance to systemic, structural injustice that plagues Brazil.
This work stirred controversy on several fronts. Together, the cast and crew protested the presidency of Michel Temer, which they claimed was a coup d'etat. It sparked pushback from Brazil's right-wing media, with some calling for a boycott of the film.
Bacurau (2019)
Set in a rural village that discovers it has vanished from maps and satellite systems, Bacurau traces how that erasure unravels into a revelation of the forces determined to eliminate it.
After the death of its matriarch, Carmelita (Lia de Itamaracá), the village of Bacurau notices troubling signs: its water supply is cut off, its cell signal disappears, and the town is literally wiped off the map. Teresa (Bárbara Colen) returns home with medical supplies, but a devious scheme to divert their water supply threatens the livelihood of the city. This is ever more terrifying as a mysterious group of foreign mercenaries, led by Michael (Udo Kier), begins to close in.
This genre-twisted western is perhaps the director's most cutting critique of unchecked political power. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019, celebrated for how the director channeled the Surreal, disconcerting experience of those who are subject to the terror and power of the state. What begins as a speculative mystery builds into one of the decade's most exhilarating political fables.
The Secret Agent (2025)
In The Secret Agent, an ex-university department head in 1977 Brazil falls prey to the everyday, normalized violence that defined Brazil's military dictatorship. In the film's opening cards, Mendonça Filho refers to this corruption as rampant "mischief."
Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a technology expert in his early forties, returns to his native Recife, hoping to reconnect with his son and outrun the dangers that follow him. But the city, living out the twilight of the dictatorship, is no refuge. This homecoming becomes a plunge into the murky circuits of power, where survival depends on dodging corruption at every level.
The film is framed as two university students combing through old documents and tapes, piecing together the buried story of Marcelo, whose real name is Armando, as he tries to outrun the violent vendetta of an electric company president. The students uncover a tale of corporate power run amok: a businessman who deploys hired hit men to kill Armando.
Armando is sheltered by Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a 77-year-old woman who hosts a motley crew of political refugees. As he reckons with his persecution, he realizes that justice is impossible to pursue openly -- he can seek it only in the shadows. That truth is embodied by the corrupt police chief (Robério Diógenes) and his two sons (Igor de Araújo and Italo Martins), whose abuses of power go unchecked and whose "mischief" operates as a routine extension of the system.
The present-day storyline is occasionally distracting, barely giving us reason to care about the two researchers, yet still pulling us away from the pressure mounting around Armando as he charts his escape. However, this lends the film a certain harshness, with the brittle realities delivered as fact.
The Secret Agent is a contained political thriller, evocative of 70s American thrillers, such as The Parallax View (1974), in which power bends reality and fact against its dissidents. Yet, it is far more expansive. The film evolves into a chilling study of how corruption at every level metastasizes, turning bureaucracy into a weapon and ordinary citizens into collateral damage.