Film reviews: The Secret Agent | If I Had Legs I'd Kick You | The Moment | Cold Storage
Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent capitalises on Wagner Moura’s movie star aura to examine the realities of military dictatorship, writes Alistair Harkness
The Secret Agent (15)
★★★★☆
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (15)
★★★☆☆
The Moment (15)
★★★☆☆
Cold Storage (15)
★★★☆☆
From its opening scene, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sprawling, playful and unsettling new film The Secret Agent explores the simultaneously brazen and insidious ways authoritarianism tries to silence resistance. Set in the Brazilian city of Recife in 1977, it revolves around an exiled academic who goes by the name of Marcelo (Wagner Moura) as he returns home seeking both refuge from his past and to reconnect with his young son. 13 years into the military junta, Marcelo has long since fallen foul of the state, but having recently got wind that there’s a contract on his life, he has to live like a secret agent, hiding his real identity and depending on a network of fellow dissidents unwilling to submit to an authoritarian regime that will shakedown its citizens while letting dead bodies lie out in the open for all to see.
That’s how we first meet Marcelo — in a petrol station being harassed by cops who ignore the murder victim that the petrol station’s owner called them about several days earlier. Horrifyingly matter-of-fact tone established, the Aquarius and Bacurau director takes us on a discombobulating ride through the politically charged landscape of Brazil in the late 1970s as Marcelo’s efforts to find a safe way out of the country for him and his son run headlong into the realities of a corrupt regime that’s openly surveilling and eliminating its critics.
Though the film works like a 1970s-style political thriller, Mendonça Filho finds intriguing ways to broaden his themes. A contemporary framing device involving students researching archives from the time emphasises the ongoing importance of bearing witness; and he also links the pop-culture dominance of Jaws in the late 1970s to the hinted-at-disappearance of a political agitator, capturing in the process the sometimes-surreal nature of authoritarianism for those on the ground experiencing it first hand. It makes for a fantastic companion piece to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another in this way — and Maura’s Oscar-nominated performance capitalises on his movie star aura to reinforce how precarious anyone’s existence can be when the forces of history conspire against everyday people.
Another big Oscar-nominated performance can be seen in writer/director Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, this time from Rose Byrne whose psychological unravelling as the stressed-out mother of a sickly child makes for one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences of recent years. Frequently shot in extreme close-ups, Byrne invites us into the fractious mental state of her character, Linda, as her world literally and metaphorically starts collapsing around her over the course of a week from hell, one in which her daughter’s unspecified eating disorder pushes her to breaking point just as the ceiling in their apartment caves in.
Like Lynne Ramsay’s recent Die My Love, the film isn’t striving for naturalism here; Bronstein’s exploration of the disproportionate toll raising a child takes on mothers has the nightmarish quality of a horror film (Eraserhead springs to mind). Still, with Linda surrounded by hostile male figures and her continually freaking-out daughter kept largely off-screen, the film doesn’t so much chip away at its themes as attack them with a sledgehammer. Byrne, though, gives it shading and depth.
Pop sensation Charli XCX takes an oversized lighter to her own gone-viral brand in The Moment, a lightly satirical music industry mockumentary in which she plays a version of herself reeling from the mass mainstream attention she received in the wake of 2024’s “Brat Summer” promotional push for her Brat album. Though a few too many of the supporting characters default to the cringe-comedy clichés of The Office, Charli herself is pretty good at self-lacerating humour. A plot development involving the botched launch of a ‘Brat’ credit card is a funny way of signifying the inevitability of selling out and Alexander Skarsgård adds value as a slimy music video director who drives a wedge between her and her longterm creative partner.
A slyly entertaining b-movie throwback that finds fun ways to deconstruct its own clichéd set-up, Cold Storage benefits from a smart script by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp (adapting his own novel of the same name) and breezy lead performances from Joe Keery (Stranger Things) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian). They play the mismatched night-shift employees of a public storage facility that we soon learn used to be a high-security military facility for housing the sort of extra-terrestrial bioweapons we see destroying a small Australian town in the film’s 17-years-earlier prologue. Flash-forward to the present day and the aforementioned gooey fungal substance has found a way to escape, meaning it’s now up to Keery and Campbell to contain it with the aid of a pair of aging bio-terror experts (played by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville) who’ve encountered it before. Lots of squishy head-exploding action follows — and some smile-raising gags too.
All films in cinemas from 20 February