The Secret Agent (2025, R)

With the way timing and availability worked out, it just so happened that I watched all three of the international features on my list in a row. I thought The Secret Agent was well-made, although I can tell there are some nuances I wasn’t getting.

In 1977, Armando sneaks back into his hometown. He wound up on the wrong side of a powerful person, and now his life is in danger. He’s staying in an apartment building filled with people in similar situations, biding their time until they can get out of Brazil with new passports under assumed names.

The Secret Agent is up for four Oscars, including Best International Feature, Best Picture, and Best Leading Actor. It’s a political thriller that feels slow at times, action-packed at others. I thought that made it a little hard to get into the rhythm of it, and at over two-and-a-half hours, I definitely felt its length. I also think I’d have gotten more out of it if I knew more about this period in Brazilian history under the military dictatorship—I could follow the story all right, but I recognized my position as an American dumbass who was watching it on more of a surface level.

That said, I still enjoyed it. I love Dona Sebastiana, the little old lady who runs the apartment refuge. She takes zero prisoners and does whatever needs to be done, but she also will try to hook Armando up with the attractive woman who lives above him. Armando’s relationship with his young son Fernando is quite affecting. Fernando’s been living with his maternal grandparents since his mom died and his dad’s been in hiding. He’s obsessed with wanting to see Jaws, despite everyone pointing out it’s going to give him nightmares, and there’s nothing he wants more than to be with his dad. Additionally, there are some great suspenseful sequences and an absolutely wild attempted hit.

Wagner Moura is the only actor I’m familiar with here, and of course, he got the Best Leading Actor nomination. Needless to say, Armando is a very different character than Pablo Escobar in Narcos, and Moura does a lovely, understated job as an ordinary man who’s been thrust into an extraordinary situation.

Warnings

Violence, disturbing images, sexual content, language, drinking/smoking, and strong thematic elements.

It Was Just an Accident (2025, PG-13)

Several films are up for Best International Feature as well as other awards this year, which is cool to see. I really liked It Was Just an Accident, an Iranian film about four people confronting their past trauma in a nearly impossible situation.

When a family with car troubles arrives outside an auto shop late at night, a mechanic named Vahid is horrified by what he hears: the squeak of the husband’s prosthetic leg when he walks sounds just like that of the man who tortured Vahid when he was imprisoned by the regime. Acting on trauma and impulse, Vahid abducts the man and plans to kill him in revenge, but he’s quickly paralyzed by doubt when the guy, Eghbal, frantically insists he’s got the wrong man. Vahid turns to several other people who’d been imprisoned around the same time, embroiling all of them in the dilemma as he searches for confirmation.

In addition to Best International Feature, this film is up for Best Original Screenplay, and I can see why. The story is very gripping, and it’s handled in a compelling way. Shiva, a photographer, is brought into the conspiracy when a mutual friend gives Vahid her info. She’s taking wedding photos when Vahid comes to her, and Goli, the bride-to-be, winds up overhearing. Goli has the same history with this man, so she and her fiance Ali join the group. Finally, Shiva enlists the help of Hamid, who’s been unable to get his life on track since his release. Everyone is in a different place in their personal lives, everyone has different feelings about Eghbal, and everyone has their own thoughts over what to do about it. Ali’s perspective as the only person here who wasn’t imprisoned and tortured adds a different wrinkle to the conflict.

The element of doubt is one of the most interesting things here. When the regime interrogates people, they’re blindfolded, so none of the former prisoners have ever seen their tormentor. They’re relying mainly on their sense of hearing, which brings back visceral memories—when Vahid first hears Eghbal’s steps at the auto shop, he’s immediately terrified. For Hamid, his sense of touch is also critical, feeling the scars on Eghbal’s leg as he recalls how their torturer used to show off his injury to brag about his war prowess. But while Hamid is quickly convinced, more than ready to act, the others feel uncertain. Is this really the man? And if it is, what are they prepared to do about it?

For all that the story is deeply personal and emotional, there are also bits of dark comedy threaded into the film as the characters deal with the more mundane reality of trying to enact a revenge fantasy, such as repeatedly having to bribe everyone from security guards to hospital staff and chasing after Vahid’s van when Hamid tries to drive off with Eghbal in the back. More than anything, this is a human story, and the characters who were imprisoned and interrogated are more than just the sum of their trauma. Their experience here is gut-wrenching, confusing, and at times, even funny.

Warnings

Violence (including discussion of rape,) language, smoking, and strong thematic elements.

Joel Fry-days: Requiem: Episode 6 – “Carys” (2018)

*Note: there isn't a single non-spoilery shot of Hal in this episode, so I'm using a picture from episode 5's fantastic argument scene* 

*Spoilers from episode 5*

Here we are at the final episode—I’m still thinking about the ending. For me personally, I don’t think they quite stuck the landing on the resolution, even though there’s still a lot of good stuff going on here. We’ve got great acting, strong character moments, and some nice twistiness.

Okay, big spoilers from episode 5: after discovering some strong evidence that Matilda’s birth certificate is fake and that Janice really did kidnap her, Hal repeatedly tries to get a hold of Matilda as he returns from a fact-finding mission to Manchester. While he’s driving, one of the Thin Ones suddenly appears behind him, and he flips the car. But when Matilda is called to the scene of the accident, Hal is missing.

That’s the situation as we enter the finale. Matilda, worried about Hal, tries to uncover the people controlling the Thin Ones—she thinks she knows who some of them are, and she’s received a message that they’re preparing for their biggest move yet. Desperately, Matilda tries to get PC Graves to believe her and help her stop them.

Obviously, there are a lot of spoilers to avoid here, so I’ll be talking around things a lot. Matilda catches a solitary lucky break in that she’s able to show Graves proof of one small part of the puzzle, earning herself a smidgeon of trust. When Graves admits, “You were right [about this,]” Matilda simply replies, “I’ve been right about a lot of things.” However, the same dogged bulldozer tendencies she’s been displaying throughout the whole miniseries may endanger that fragile trust. When Matilda doesn’t listen to Graves’s directions, when she charges in and grabs people and makes wild accusations, she doesn’t help her case. Her opponents are perpetually calm and appear rational, and she comes off as unstable by comparison.

It’s clear that the conspirators have been feeding into this all along, backing Matilda into corners so she gets more and more desperate. And then what do they do? They throw it back in her face. Matilda confronts one of them about everything she’s lost while trying to solve this mystery, and the conspirator tells her, “No, Matilda. You did it. All those things, you sacrificed them to get to here.” I have very rightly given Matilda grief for how she’s treated people here, but at that icy remark, I feel like she should at the very least get to explode the conspirator with her mind.

Matilda has been periodically seeing visions of Janice since her death, and there’s an excellent scene between the two of them in this episode. Also, shoutout to Brendan Coyle as Stephen, who kept me guessing practically to the end about whether or not I could trust him—even when I was 99.9% sure what the answer was, he’d still give me these moments where I’d get a tiny flicker of, “But maybe…?”

As I said, I’m not sure about the ending. Since I don’t engage much with horror as a genre, it’s possible that I don’t really know my way around the types of resolutions that work as a satisfying horror ending. I just know that, for me, it left me underwhelmed, with a bit of an, “...Oh,” reaction. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot that I like about this miniseries—including some stuff I love!—but a lackluster ending can color my overall opinion of a story.

In the finale, Hal is an important plot point without, unfortunately, being a major presence. He’s only in a few brief scenes, and while he’s effective in them, there’s very little for him to do here. That said, I promise my dissatisfaction with the ending isn’t just about a lack of screen time for Joel Fry! I understand why things shake out the way they do there.

Unfortunately, every bit of Fry’s limited screen time here is quite spoilery, so I won’t really discuss it. Instead, I’ll talk about the ways he remains crucial to the narrative without actually being onscreen for much of the episode. Obviously, the car accident and his disappearance weighs heavily on people’s minds, from Matilda to Trudy to Graves (who’s investigating it.) Trudy regrets the last conversation they had before Hal left for Manchester, and Matilda is determined to help if there’s any hope of saving him—when another character urges her to flee, she insists, “I won’t leave you, and I won’t leave Hal.” (There’s no specific mention of whether Matilda regrets the last conversation she had with Hal before he left, but hopefully she does.) Besides that, the evidence he found is important to the plot, we see Matilda learn why he hadn’t been able to get a hold of her, and there’s a great gut-punch moment when Matilda realizes how many times he tried to call her.

Before I get into my final thoughts, there’s one more thing I have to get off my chest. I found out that back in 2021, the director of this show cast Joel Fry as Capt. frickin’ Wentworth(!!!) in an adaptation of Persuasion that got canceled by the studio after Netflix announced their incredibly shaky version with Dakota Johnson and Cosmo Jarvis! It was going to star Sarah Snook from Succession. Aside from the Joel-Fry-as-a-Jane-Austen-leading-man of it all, that cast pairing is fascinating to me, and even though I’m four years late on this news, I’m in mourning that this film isn’t getting made. Why?!?

Moving along…

Accent Watch

Southern British English.

Recommend?

In General – I think I would. It’s still a good ride, even if I’m not entirely happy with where it goes in the end.

Joel Fry – Yes, yes, yes! Fry’s performance is beautifully nuanced. He does such great work as Hal!

Warnings

Strong thematic elements (including suicide and child abduction,) violence, disturbing images, language, drinking/smoking/drug references, and brief sexual content.