Wagner Moura is on the run in Brazil, 1977, in ‘The Secret Agent’

Wagner Moura in a scene from “The Secret Agent” (Neon)

You can almost smell the sweat in “The Secret Agent,” a stylish, slow-burn thriller set amid radicals and mercenaries in 1977 Brazil. Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho opens with a note that it was “a time of mischief,” a sly preview of what’s ahead.

Over a little more than two hours, we meet hit men, corrupt cops, a two-headed cat, an urban legend with a life of its own and Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a quiet man running away from something — and into something possibly worse. Death hangs over Recife as Carnival blares on, academics and journalists are persecuted under the dictatorship and dissenters routinely vanish. The beer is cold, the shirts are half-buttoned, and both sex and violence feel disturbingly casual.

The film begins with Marcelo stopping for gas beside a decaying body barely covered by cardboard. The police eventually arrive, not to deal with the corpse but to scrutinize Marcelo and his yellow Beetle. The mood is tense and foreboding — humor and absurdity break through, but the dread never leaves.

A title like “The Secret Agent” suggests slick espionage, but Marcelo is no traditional operative. The film slowly clarifies why he’s hiding, why his son lives with his in-laws and why a wealthy man has hired killers to chase him. Moura’s restrained, haunted performance won him best actor at Cannes. He moves through the film like a ghost, changing his name and trying to lie low until the danger passes.

Recife is full of unofficial “agents” — some protecting, some profiting. The story is framed by a modern-day archivist reviewing taped phone tappings and an interview with Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), a lawyer-preservationist documenting a history newspapers couldn’t safely record.

One of the strangest threads is a recurring hairy leg — a local myth turned metaphor — which briefly sends the film into gleeful B-movie horror. Udo Kier appears in a chilling sequence as a Holocaust survivor whose scars police treat as a curiosity. The ensemble is uniformly strong, and Mendonça Filho even reconstructs a vanished movie palace as a key location.

Like its needle drops, from Donna Summer to local hits, “The Secret Agent” is a richly personal film — part resurrection, part elegy.

[Abridged]

LINDSEY BAHR, MDT/AP Film Writer

“The Secret Agent,” a Neon release in select theaters Wednesday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “some full nudity, sexual content, language and strong bloody violence.” Running time: 158 minutes. ★★★★