Cast: Wagner Moura, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Cândido
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
In Irish Cinemas: 20th February 2026
Set against the suffocating climate of Brazil under military rule in the 1970s, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest work unfolds as a richly textured, deeply unsettling piece of cinema. Its pleasures are many and contradictory: sun-soaked urban sensuality jostles with menace, grotesque comic detours collide with moments of sudden brutality, and a slow-burn mystery drifts towards violence with unnerving calm. What emerges is a film about the banal cruelty of authoritarianism, from bureaucratic sabotage to street-level terror, observed with a contemporary eye. Comparisons might be drawn with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, but this film ranges further and stranger, resisting easy categorisation. Echoes of Sergio Leone’s patience, Antonioni’s existential drift in The Passenger, the crackle of Elmore Leonard filtered through Tarantino, and even the social sprawl of City of God or the intimacy of Roma all seem to pass through its bloodstream.
Wagner Moura anchors the film as Marcelo, a man edging towards exile, rattling across the country in a canary-yellow Volkswagen Beetle that attracts the wrong kind of attention from venal local police. Recently widowed, he has left his young son in the care of his late wife’s parents. The boy’s grandfather runs a local cinema, screening Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicles such as Le Magnifique, whose trailer dubs its hero “the Secret Agent”, an ironic echo of the fate awaiting Marcelo. He is no firebrand revolutionary, nor a card-carrying radical, but escape becomes unavoidable. Formerly an academic engineer, Marcelo crossed a line by challenging a government minister intent on gutting his university department and siphoning off valuable research into a private firm in which he held a financial stake. The fallout is swift and lethal: a pair of grotesque assassins, doubling as secret police, are dispatched to eliminate the problem.
Rescued at the last moment, Marcelo is smuggled into a safe house in Recife run by an underground network. There, he joins a small community of the displaced, presided over by Dona Sebastiana, whose warm, maternal presence, beautifully played by Tânia Maria, offers fragile respite. Under an assumed identity, Marcelo is installed in a government office issuing identity cards, a bitterly comic twist for a man who no longer officially exists.
This posting opens two dangerous avenues. One leads into the archives, where Marcelo searches for traces of his deceased mother. The other brings him into contact with a spectacularly corrupt police officer, portrayed with oily menace by Robério Diógenes, whose unit uses the chaos of carnival as cover for extrajudicial killings. Meanwhile, the wider city succumbs to collective hysteria. With Jaws fresh in cinemas, news breaks of a shark caught with a human leg in its belly. The tabloids run wild, spinning lurid tales of a supernatural “hairy leg” prowling the streets at night. State violence mutates into farce, rumour into mass delusion, and terror into something almost folkloric.
Formally assured and visually luxuriant, the film glides forward at its own deliberate pace, lingering on erotic digressions, absurdist humour and quiet sorrow. Every detour feels intentional, every pause loaded. A striking cameo from Udo Kier as a haunted tailor adds another odd note to an already eclectic symphony. This is not a thriller in the conventional sense, and viewers demanding tight plotting and constant propulsion may bristle. Instead, it operates like a novel brought to the screen: attentive to character, atmosphere and moral rot. Moura delivers a performance of remarkable nuance, grounding the film’s sprawl in human vulnerability, while Mendonça Filho uses the canvas to indulge in moments of audacious, exhilarating filmmaking.
Overall: 7.5/10
Movie Reviewer
