Back in the Seventies, in the Brazilian city of Recife, a “hairy leg” became an urban legend, popularised knowingly by the press as a scapegoat for all the violence doled out by the military police. That myth resurfaces in Brazil’s powerhouse Oscar contender The Secret Agent, when a disembodied limb is pulled from a shark’s belly and brought to grotesque life: a sentient killer, rendered in janky stop-motion as it hops around the streets with vengeance on its mind, terrorising the locals. A conventional political thriller, this is not.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s excavation of Brazil at the time of its military dictatorship plays out somewhere between hallucination and pulp fiction – mixing spaghetti western violence with Hitchcockian suspense and scabrous horror-comedy. It’s set during carnival in 1977 Recife, where a man arrives in a sunshine-yellow VW Beetle, amateur assassins lurk in every shadow, and the local cinema is showing Jaws to a population already on edge because of the newspaper stories circulating about that murderous leg.
