BONUS: The Oscars snubbed "The Secret Agent"

Ryan & Grant convene their movie club to discuss The Secret Agent, one of — or maybe the — best film(s) of 2025, and what it says about where we're at as a society. Want to hear the rest of this conversation? And get even more extra content, like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Ryan Broderick?

  Correding. No. Tudo bem, meu amigo?

• 0:34Speaker 02

  This is gonna be a long day for me who is dumb and speaks one language poorly, and that's English.

• 0:41Ryan Broderick?

  Unlike you, I speak many languages extremely poorly. So.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  But, but let me, let me start with this. Would you rather be kicked in a park by an amputated leg? Or would you rather be pulling an amputated leg out of a shark's stomach?

• 0:59Ryan Broderick?

  Do you know what the amputated leg in the park scene is about?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  I have some ideas, I have thoughts.

• 1:06Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, well, it's a funny, it's a funny one for you to choose to start with. I, I was not totally-

• 1:12Speaker 02

  I'm just thinking of a face value here, buddy.

• 1:13Ryan Broderick?

  I was not totally aware of the context there, but I found a Brazilian sort of talking about it. I guess during the dictatorship, a lot of newspapers would use like sightings of Brazilian folk monsters and such as a way to warn especially the queer community that the military had come in and kicked the shit out of everyone somewhere.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Obviously, Ryan, I did not know that, and that's rude of you, but I'm just asking face value.

• 1:40Ryan Broderick?

  So that's, that's what that scene is. That scene is the newspaper-

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Creepypasta way. Would you rather have a magical amputated leg kick you? Or would you rather be smelling the inside of a shark as you have to pull out an amputated leg?

• 1:56Ryan Broderick?

  I'm also excited because my favorite word in Portuguese is the word for shark, which is tubarão.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  All right. You're not going to answer. I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds or culture into eventually reality. And today, we are talking about the 2025 movie, Secret Agent. Joining me, a man who has nightmares about Jaws every single night, Ryan Broderick. Welcome to your podcast.

• 2:36Ryan Broderick?

  I've never had any nightmares about Jaws. I think sharks are cool.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  You've never had any, have you ever had any animal related nightmare?

• 2:43Ryan Broderick?

  Never, never, ever. It literally did nothing. Jaws did nothing for me. I mean, it's a cool movie, but even as a kid, I was like, I feel like it'd be pretty easy not to get eaten by a shark.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Moving right along. You wanted to talk about this movie. I just finished watching it. I find it very interesting that of all of the movies right now that people have been requesting for us to talk about, this is the one that you said, yes, let's like, we need to talk about this now. Tell me why you had such a strong reaction before we get into it.

• 3:14Ryan Broderick?

  So I thought it was a very Panic World movie in ways that surprised me. It, I mean, we've been talking about sort of like the, the American weirdness of cinema over the last, you know, year and a half or so. And I think, uh, Secret Agent, or O A Gente Secreta, starring Wagner Mora, is actually doing a lot of similar things to something like Eddington, but doing them in a far better, more interesting way. Also, Secret Agent has very quickly for me become like my top pick for best picture this year. Like, I think it's, I think it's

• 3:55Ryan Broderick?

  just an incredible film. And I think it's an especially important movie for Americans to watch right now, who may not sort of understand what a dictatorship feels like and looks like in the contours of sort of how a regime functions. And so I really wanted to talk about it. Uh, it's just, I think it's just an amazing movie. It takes place during Brazil's military dictatorship, which lasted for 21 years. I have met people who grew up in it, lived it. I know reporters who managed to survive it. And I was, I don't know, just sort of blown away by how the movie depicts this societal level hierarchy of violence and corruption.

• 4:37Ryan Broderick?

  That everyone kind of knows encompasses the regime and the way sort of that works with the media, as you said, and the sort of severed leg segment, which we can talk more about, the paranoia, the isolation. And then ultimately, you know, we can go, we can go beat by beat in a second, but the ending, which we can talk more about, shows you that once you've escaped something like that, it leaves its fingerprints in your society and in your own personal history and your own memories. I just think it's an extraordinary movie and, and one that like, makes a lot of things literal that we abstractly talk about on this show.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. As is my nature, I'm gonna give a little feelings corner before we, before we move through it. Finally, I knew very little about it and it's in theaters right now, along with the movie Serat. Have you seen Serat?

• 5:31Ryan Broderick?

  I have not, but I was surprised seeing, I'm going through all the Oscar nom movies, the major ones right now. And I was shocked by how sentimental value actually covers a lot of similar territory where it has an entire subplot about Nazi occupation of Norway.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  I will add it to the list, but, but I was, it was like peak seasonal depression, end of February. And we were like, let's go to a movie. And like, the description of Serat is just a man looks for his daughter at a rave and secret agent was like about espionage in a war torn country. And I said, I can't handle a movie about politics right now. I'm looking to escape. And then Serat was the most intense and jarring version I've ever seen depicted of what it's like to live while a war is going around you. It's an incredible, difficult movie. But so I kind of came into secret agent with like this, like, I know I'm in for something. And it's a

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Kind of beautifully, much gentler, like straightforward movie.

• 6:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  But then, then today, I finished it last night. And then today, as I was thinking about it, I kind of got hit by how stunning and how emotional it was. But it's like, all these other movies we've been talking about are so intense to try to capture everything. And this movie takes its time. And it, and it has this like, it does the, it, it does the paranoia in this like, slow, quiet way that seems almost easier to swallow in the moment to then let it linger in your brain, where every other movie we've talked about, we've been like, they kind of force you to shut down or resort to slapstick. And it, yeah, it's, it's, it is a very different texture to be able to process.

• 7:16Ryan Broderick?

  I would say. I would say of the sort of major films of the last year and change, it is one that I think is so dense, but also so pleasant. Eddington is a deeply unpleasant film. It's probably the closest American film to something like Secret Agent that has come out in the last year. But Secret Agent is telling a, it just, I mean, it, I don't know, it's like coughing baby nuclear bomb. Like, it's just a different, it's a different level of film. And I do want to go beat by beat, actually. I don't like doing that normally. But let's start with the opening, because I think the opening is just like,

• 7:59Ryan Broderick?

  it's funny, I, I was watching it with my girlfriend and I remember we get to like, we, I paused to go to the bathroom and it was an hour and a half into the nearly three hour running time. And I was like, I can't wait to find out what this movie is about. That wasn't a bad thing. Like, I just sort of enjoyed, I enjoyed it. But it opens with Wagner Mora's character. He's driving basically along the coast of, of what is called like the Brazilian Caribbean, Pernambuco. I did, I drove that coastline, actually, years ago. It's, it's gorgeous. Like, it's actually gorgeous. He's driving to Recife, which is the capital of Pernambuco, a beautiful stretch

• 8:42Ryan Broderick?

  of what is called the Brazilian Caribbean sometimes. And it's carnival. He needs gas and he ends up at a gas station where a man has been shot to death and is rotting out in the sun and being eaten by wild dogs.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Covered in like two sheets of newspaper held down by a rock.

• 8:58Ryan Broderick?

  And like, nobody really cares. The local law enforcement doesn't care. They do eventually show up, but only to try to extract a bribe from him. And it is an incredible scene because it's just like, I mean, it's funny and it's gorgeous and it's disgusting. And like, there's a whole scene where like, a, I mean, do you, do you know much about sort of like Brazilian carnival season?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Next to nothing besides one book I read.

• 9:22Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so like, I was actually in Pernambuco for what they call pre carnival a couple of years ago. So it's like, there's the, there's the weeks leading up to carnival where you, where like, society still kind of functions. And then carnival starts and it like, Brazilian society basically just stops. Nothing really works. Everyone's just partying. It's great. It's beautiful. I have friends who just got back to New York from, they do like all of winter there, our winter there. And so you're sort of, it's playing with this really interesting thing where it's like, and, and I should also just say here, I am not a Brazilian expert. I spent a lot of time there, but it is a country that is extremely complicated with a history that like, I'm only sort of vaguely aware of, and I'm gonna do my best not to

• 10:02Ryan Broderick?

  sort of overextend here. Brazilians, uh, desculpa. Uh, if I get anything wrong, you can email me angrily. You always do.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Who, who corrects you more Brazilians or ARG players?

• 10:17Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, both, honestly, equal, equal amounts. But with the Brazilians, I'm like, yes, I deserve it. I got it wrong with the ARG people. I'm like, don't ever email me. So Vecna Morris' character, uh, does this long drive into Recife, right as carnival's kind of getting underway. And he ends up at a house full of people and they, they don't really explain anything, which is kind of amazing.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  We actually go back to the gas station scene for two seconds. But is your read on that, when the cops show up, that they were suspicious of him by that time?

• 10:52Ryan Broderick?

  Not at all.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  That's just like, Oh, there's a new person here. There's a new person for us to like extract cash from.

• 10:59Ryan Broderick?

  Not even new, not even new. I mean, he is, um, he's in a fairly clean car, kind of. But I don't, I, I, I think this is, he, like, my interpretation of that scene is that, like, he could have been anybody.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Interesting. Okay. I, I didn't, I don't have enough historical context to, to know whether or not it was like, this is just like totalitarian, we're suspicious of anyone and anyone that like can't be bribed, we'll get there.

• 11:26Ryan Broderick?

  Well, so this is why I wanted to talk about this film because like, that's not, like, the 1984 totalitarian surveillance state stuff. That's not how a dictatorship works. A dictatorship works by the cops can do whatever they want with impunity. And they're just gonna rob you for your cigarettes when they can't find something to like, because the, the whole sequence is the cops trying to find something wrong with his car. So they can extract money from him. And then they're finally just like, how about you give us a donation to the local, uh, police union or whatever. And he's like, I have cigarettes. And then they just take those like, so, and, and that's what I think is so crucial about this movie is that throughout, it is constantly saying, all of your high-minded ideas about how well-oiled the machine, a dictatorship may be.

• 12:06Ryan Broderick?

  It is just a bunch of idiots and goofballs causing human misery. And like, that is the point that the first scene kind of, I think, is, is, is kind of crucial for understanding that because you have a literal rotting corpse. Next to the cops who do not care about it. And they're just trying to rob this guy for his cigarettes.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  They're, they're, it is explicitly said, we're not here for that. We're here to see what's up with this guy's car.

• 12:29Ryan Broderick?

  We're here, we're here to like rob this guy. Yeah, exactly. So he, he gets into a city and he gets put up at this house that we like, don't really know much about. And I, I kind of love that they actually don't ever feel the need to tell you. Because by the end of the movie, you know exactly what's going on, but like they're, they're really sort of drip dropping you. And you meet, uh, the lovely Donna Sebastiana, played by, uh, Tania Maria, who is, she's amazing because she is, she is saying nothing but exposition almost the entire movie and yet, does not explain anything that's going on. It's such a, it's such a clever. Rhetorical device like I I and she's also just And you know, this woman too, like you know, the like, the like, the woman who runs the neighborhood.

• 13:13Ryan Broderick?

  I have met Donna Sebastianas before. Yes, they're amazing. Yeah. And they will yell at you and feed you. And yeah, they're incredible. There's a scene we will get to later on that stole the movie for from me. Yes. She she stole the movie from me and I but we that's a little tease. We'll get there. For for the Oscar season, HBO Brazil did this ad with Tania Maria where they spliced her into Oscar films this year. And so she shows up in front of the sinners barn and it's the footage from sinners, but they've replaced the Irish vampires with her and a bunch of Brazilians. And so they're like, basically like Michael B. Jordan's character is like, oh, can you play us a little something? And then Tania Maria and them sing like this really old Brazilian folk song.

• 13:58Ryan Broderick?

  And then he's like, where are you from? Like in the movie? And then she's like, oh, we're from Brazil. And then I guess he replies back, oh, isn't that far? And then she says, what am I? She goes, what? What do you think I look like a GPS? I it's adorable. Man, Warner Brothers is cooking this year. I can't wait to see what they do next. And I really, it's really nice to have a company that I am trusting for for quality again. End of statement. Back to this movie. Right. So he gets to receive he meets Donna Sebastiana and he meets the other people in this building. He meets Claudia, the dentist, and he meets the Angolan civil war refugees, Teresa, Victoria, and Antonio. And that sort of sets up this this community that he's in.

• 14:43Ryan Broderick?

  And the only kind of giveaway about what is happening here is a line where like a guy's like dropping off supplies and he refers them as refugees. And the other guy's like, don't call us that. And that's the only sort of in like, the only kind of thing that makes you go like, something is up here, which I think is very clever. There's one other thing that I'd love to talk to you about for a second, which is the cat.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Can you describe the cat and the metaphor of the cat?

• 15:11Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I'm, yeah, I'm curious what you think the metaphor is because I, I had a take on that. So there is also a two-faced cat, a literal, it is literal two cats that like had a birth defect. And there's, it's two cats in one, basically. What do you think that symbolizes?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  In a movie where everyone is forced to have multiple identities, I think it is saying that under extremism that is trying to nail you down and make you not exist in a real way,

• 15:43Speaker 02

  you have to splinter yourself and you can survive, but like the damage is permanent. And, and, and you're like always under threat. Like, like they said that like, we had to take this cat in because they would, they would have killed it, the swarm cat. And I, I think that that represents everyone in here.

• 16:03Ryan Broderick?

  There's a very clever, like multi-stage metaphor happening where Wagner Moore's character is, I saw someone refer to him, I think it was a Brazilian Twitter user referred to him. They were beefing with like a Sinners fan and they were like, Michael B. Jordan played two characters. Wagner Moore played three. And their argument was that Wagner Moore's character before his wife dies is character one. Wagner Moore's character after his wife dies is character two. And then he plays his own son, who was so good that I actually turned to my girlfriend in the middle and was like, I can't believe they found someone who looked exactly like Wagner Moore. That's amazing. Because not only this, I don't know if this was noticeable to you.

• 16:46Ryan Broderick?

  He had, there's a bunch of comments about his accent that are happening throughout the movie. He is speaking in a Sao Paulo accent with like pernambuco inflections. But then him as his son in the future is a just totally, and I remember like, When I was in that area of Brazil, I could not understand a lick of anything anybody said because their accent is like, basically north of Brazil, think of it this way, north of Brazil is like south of the, the south of the US. The slave trade ended up sort of spitting people out in the same, same way. And it's a massive hub for like leftism. So the north is, that's what, that's what all the regionality is happening in, in the movie.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, it's like whenever I go past the New York line and I have to deal with people from the Massachusetts area and I can't understand a goddamn word out of their Dunkin' Donuts mouths.

• 17:35Ryan Broderick?

  Also works that way, also works that way. But, but yeah, so north of Brazil is sort of this massive bastion of former slave colonies that actually oftentimes would revolt and create communes. There's a lot of cool history there. Anyways, my point is, uh, there's an interesting like double or triple metaphor happening because you have the cat and Wagner Moore being literally like splintered, as you said, but then the splintering further is because Wagner Moore is playing his own son. So it's like, it's very interesting what they're doing. Um, yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  And he is a character who has two different names, one in alias.

• 18:08Ryan Broderick?

  Two different names, two different like distinct personalities, actors playing different characters. Like, yeah, it's a lot of that. It's really cool. We then set up the fact that he will be working at basically like the cities, like, I don't know, like, um, like the, like a civil building that like organizes identity cards for people. Obviously like a movie about Brazil is gonna have like an intense subplot about paperwork not being filed correctly. A country that runs on signing things in triplicate. One time I had to extend a visa there and it took me like four days of standing like in an office. I, I almost lost, anyways. There's a reason Terry Gilliam made a movie called Brazil. So anyways, he starts working at the identity card office and that's where

• 18:50Ryan Broderick?

  he meets, uh, Chief Euclid's, uh, Euclidis and his failed sons, one of whom is his biological white son, and then one is probably also his biological son, but they do like some kind of obs, it's like, they did a really funny casting thing where like the two guys totally could be brothers. Like they've cut their hair to be balding in the same way and they have like similar mannerisms, but not really clear.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  They say they're like, he's like his son, you know, which I read is like they're saving face that he clearly had an affair.

• 19:22Ryan Broderick?

  He clearly had an affair.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  And instead, it's like out of the benevolence of his heart, this gangster cop.

• 19:27Ryan Broderick?

  This is also, right. And this is also the section where they set up the, the sort of other main metaphor of the movie, which is the shark metaphor, which I just think is incredible and fascinating. And I'm not totally sure what I even think it means, actually.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  So I'll, I'll, I'll just tee it up and then you can talk about what it means. Uh, the implicat- they get called in to disa-

• 19:55Ryan Broderick?

  They get called out of carnival. So they're covered in glitter and, and Euclid is like covered in like lipstick because he's just been making out all night with people. Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  For them to discover a very smelly room where there's a shark that as they were starting to dissect the shark, a human leg is protruding from the stomach. Um, and it's very clear to at least us, the audience, probably to the scientists as well, that implication is this was a body they've thrown over that they tried to get rid of.

• 20:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  And this leg reemerging could cause them some headaches.

• 20:32Ryan Broderick?

  It, it becomes clear that like they're using carnival as a pretext to kill dissidents. That's that they're to disappear people. That's that. And this movie I think is very, very important in how it portrays that because I think when I say, if, if I were to say to you, oh, the, the regime of the dictatorship is disappearing people, you would think, oh, like what we saw in Minneapolis. And you gotta figure this is 10 years into the dictatorship, but pretty much this is like, yeah, towards, yeah, this is basically the peak of it. And it, it has extended itself to the point where like a bunch of good old boys in a pickup truck can also do that. Like, yeah, we're not talking about like the federal police

• 21:16Ryan Broderick?

  in Brazil. We're talking about like a local police sheriff or whatever, a local police chief. And he is also now just rounding up what are implied to be like.

• 21:28Ryan Broderick?

  They have a, they use the code for who they're later in the movie, who they're, who they're rounding up. And I can't remember what the codes are, but I think it's supposed to imply that like they're, they're basically just like arresting like gay people or people who are have been accused of being communists and just like throwing them in the river and letting sharks eat them, basically.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  If you have a beard, you're a communist, is sort of the, the implication.

• 21:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. If you're like a hippie, basically. Yeah. Like that's, that's what happened.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  He has, he has like a relatively tight beard, but every, but like anytime he encounters people outside, they're, they're, they're telling him he looks like a communist when he still has the beard.

• 22:04Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, oh, Wagner Morris character.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Wagner Morris, yes.

• 22:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. Armando or Marcelo, Marcelo, depending on who he is in the movie at the time. Yeah. And so, yeah, we, we meet them. We sort of set up this idea of like the, the shark as the metaphor for the regime. And the way that like the shark will kill you, but like there's always evidence. And I think that is a huge thread in this movie that gets fleshed out like pretty soon after, which is that like it flashes forward to the 21st century and we discover that we are actually listening to tapes, which we have not sort of understood yet, but there are two college students going through tapes. And so this idea of like a leg, a human leg is found in a shark.

• 22:48Ryan Broderick?

  They have found tapes from the regime. Like that's, that's sort of how I read it. Um, there might, you know, be other ways to read it, but like I, I, I sort of, I love the idea that this movie is, is is asking the question of like, not what is the value of documenting a dictatorship, but like,

• 23:09Speaker 02

  I would put it that people are, that like the damage done in these times, people are going to be picking at the pieces for, for resolutions in a way that they cannot.

• 23:21Ryan Broderick?

  There is no.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  And when they're listening to the tapes, they're constantly asking what year, what day was this? It's like, it's an incomplete record. All of these things are incomplete and scattered, but.

• 23:32Ryan Broderick?

  There's going to be, if a shark is found in a person's stomach, people are gonna fucking pay attention.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Other way around. If a person's found in a shark's stomach.

• 23:39Ryan Broderick?

  No, I, I, I think what you're saying is right. It's like, the shark exists, and it will always leave evidence, but that evidence doesn't necessarily give you closure or answers. And even in the movie, like, pretty quickly also, that leg is then disposed of by Euclid's, like, fail sons, who basically just throw it back in the river. And then the movie wants to hit you even further over the head with all of this by introducing Hans, a Jewish Holocaust survivor that has to pretend to be a Nazi, because it's also implied that he is gay, and basically getting protection from the local sheriff by doing like a weird show and

• 24:22Ryan Broderick?

  tell of his, like, wounds, because, like, the guy doesn't understand that, like, that Germans could be Jewish and didn't fight for the German side, basically?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  It's like, they see Marcelo, he's going by Marcelo at the time, and the, the sheriff and his fail sons, and they're like, "We like the cut of your jib. Come, come like..."

• 24:48Ryan Broderick?

  Come meet this Nazi we have.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Come meet this Nazi we have, and harass him into showing his marks, and to more insult to injury, uh, celebrating him as a Nazi and hiding.

• 25:03Ryan Broderick?

  Right, but he's actually a Jew, who definitely having...

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Talk about multiple identities, who needs to do a performance

• 25:10Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  to keep masking his existence. And, um, the bullies are all idiots who are just happy if you are, like, showing them physical wounds.

• 25:22Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And, and like, but there, there's also, the, the, I think, there's a, definitely like a cultural dimension to this, where like, even to this day, Brazil has a, let's say, complicated relationship with Nazism. Um, it is illegal.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Does anywhere not have a complicated relationship with Nazism?

• 25:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, it is illegal to display the swastika in Brazil, which we, you know, could learn a thing or two from.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  On our Patreon, patreon.com, we have two, not one, but two new bonuses exclusive for subscribers. One is about a movie we really disliked, Her, and the other is about a movie that rocks, The Secret Agent, and you can listen to them both now at patreon.com/panacworld. But wait, Ryan Broderick, I hear that you can access our bonus content somewhere else now. Is that true?

• 26:17Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. Courier Plus, now on Apple Podcasts, which will give you access to all our new bonus episodes when they come out, and you'll have ad-free versions of our episodes. Not only that, you get ad-free episodes and bonus content from all of Courier's other shows, including How Is This Better with Akili Hughes, pretty good show, and Gloves Off with Tara McGowan, also great show, and more from Courier. All great stuff. Courier Plus on Apple Podcasts.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  And you know, while you're there, Apple-

• 26:44Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, wait, you're here too, Grant?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  I'm here too.

• 26:48Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And while you're there, we haven't bugged you about this in a while. Leave us a nice review.