NEON has unveiled a new trailer and poster for “The Secret Agent,” the gripping Brazilian political thriller from writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho, as the film continued its sprint from Cannes coronation to a major Oscar night presence.
Set in Brazil under the shadow of 1977’s military dictatorship, the story followed Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s who arrived in Recife during Carnival week hoping to reunite with his son—only to realize the city wasn’t the non-violent refuge he’d been chasing.
At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, the film emerged as the most awarded title in the lineup, with Wagner Moura taking Best Actor and Mendonça Filho winning Best Director. And by the time Academy voters weighed in, “The Secret Agent” landed four nominations at the 98th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best International Feature Film, and Best Casting.
Those nominations also clarified the scale of the campaign: this isn’t only an international-feature contender cruising in a parallel lane, but a film crossing into the Academy’s biggest categories while remaining Brazil’s official submission in International Feature.
That same broad embrace showed up in the precursor circuit. The film won Best Motion Picture–Non-English Language at the Golden Globes, while Moura took Best Actor in a Motion Picture–Drama. At Film Independent’s Spirit Awards, it won Best International Film. And in France, it won the Lumière Award for Best International Co-Production. The critics groups kept pace too—National Society of Film Critics named it Best Film Not in the English Language, another marker of how fully it crossed over beyond “one-category” admiration.
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Mendonça Filho’s work often treats place as pressure—the Brazilian city of Recife as a living system of power, class, and paranoia—and “The Secret Agent” kept that focus, using Marcelo’s flight back to his hometown as a collision point between family longing and state menace. The supporting cast included Maria Fernanda Cândido, Gabriel Leone, and Tânia Maria, with producer Emilie Lesclaux credited among the film’s key architects as it moved through the season’s top-tier stops.
“The Secret Agent” became available for purchase and rental on digital platforms on February 3, 2026, including Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and YouTube Movies & TV. It’s scheduled to stream on Hulu starting March 1, 2026. Watch the new trailer below.
