[Source: AP]

You can almost smell the sweat in “The Secret Agent,” a stylish, slow burn thriller about radicals and mercenaries in 1977 Brazil. Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho begins his film with the note that it was “a time of mischief.”

It’s a sly kind of promise of what’s to come over the next 2 ½ hours, where audiences will meet hit men, zombie legs, corrupt cops, a two-headed cat and a quiet man named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) who is running away from something — and into something possibly more dangerous. The film opens in limited release Wednesday.

Death is everywhere in Recife, where life has taken on a kind of surrealism as raucous Carnival celebrations drag on and the body count gets larger. Academics and journalists are being persecuted under the military dictatorship, and dissenters seem to often end up dead.

But the music is good, the beer is cold and the shirts are buttoned low and haphazardly (if at all). The violence is casual and so is the sex.

The film opens as Marcelo stops for gas on the outskirts of town, where a decaying body is barely covered by cardboard. Flies and dogs swarm for a taste of the carcass, which the attendant says has been there for a few days already.

The police have said they’ll get to it when they can. When a cop car does pull up, they don’t go for the body, however: They’re out to inspect Marcelo and his yellow Beetle. It’s tense and foreboding, a tone that is sustained for the duration. Like Marcelo, the audience is never not bracing for the worst. Thankfully it’s often punctured with humor and absurdity.

A title like “The Secret Agent” might make one suspect that Marcelo is some kind of slick operative in this world.

The film teases out exactly why he’s on the run, why his young son is living with his in-laws and why some wealthy man has hired two other men to kill him, but he doesn’t seem like a guy with his own body count.

Though he might not be a movie spy in the traditional sense, he is operating in this world almost as a ghost, changing his name and trying to live quietly in plain sight while waiting for the persecution to end.

The understated performance won Moura best actor at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

There’s a whole network of ordinary secret agents in Recife, some protecting, some selling information to the highest bidder.

The film is framed by a modern-day archivist listening to taped recordings of phone tappings and an interview by a woman, Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who is kind of a lawyer, kind of a preservationist — documenting a history that the newspapers can’t even cover in a straightforward manner.

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