For trying to escape a Brazilian military dictatorship, the fugitive Armando (Wagner Moura) skates so close to danger as he tries to find a way out. In the opening scene, he fuels up at a gas station where a dead body lies on the ground, and the cops arrive not to haul off the corpse but to score a bribe off Armando. Without missing a beat, Armando obliges them with his cigarettes and delves deeper into Recife during the busy time of carnival. It won’t be the last time he maneuvers his way around the police, and they won’t be the most dangerous figures he runs into.

The Secret Agent rarely becomes predictable as a 1970s political thriller, thanks in no small part to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s offbeat direction. He’d previously directed Bacurau, a bonkers tale of a targeted village and UFOs, and he didn’t disappoint here. At first, I thought Armando’s on-the-lam story was going to be played straight. He’s portrayed in a sympathetic light for housing with other political refugees, has a sad history of his wife being assassinated, makes brief contact with his kid being cared for by his in-laws, and works in a job so absurdly close to a police office it’s enough to make even the most innocent sweat. But just when it seems like we’re getting too comfortable with Armando’s plight to get some passports out of there, there are some sharks, an overlapping plot in present-day Recife, and an amputated leg that goes on a rampage. Yes, this film briefly turns into a monster B-movie at one point.

Such an odd mixture might not seem like it would work, and yet Filho pulls off something amazing by daring to be unorthodox. It’s just so easy to get lost in the characters of this story that are so fully realized they can easily stroll down any odd route the director sends them down. Moura’s performance as Armando has its moments of restrained rage and deep pain, where nightmares of his wife plague his nights, and phone calls with the resistance made in broad daylight are made with focused anxiety for the ticking clock. Armando’s feisty landlady is an elder with some spite left in her for fascism and enough history to know how to maintain a complex of those trying not to use their names. Armando’s son, Fernando, has a fondness for the Jaws movie poster and a desire to see it, given that his grandfather, Alexandre, is a projectionist at the local theater. There’s even some charm to the pursuing hitmen just a few steps away from Armando and one mistake away from catching a bullet.

The Secret Agent is an unbelievably alive and unpredictable tale of how messy it can be to maneuver through a web of fascism and untangle it afterward. It’s a movie that is punchingly poetic in how it finds just the right notes for a thriller about an authoritarian state, daring to strike some juxtapositions in soundtrack and tone that surprisingly work. That willingness to take a wilder route with a rather depressing state of affairs, surprisingly, makes the story hit that much harder with its emotional drive and fury against oppression. And with so many films reflecting that anxiety of the present, everybody could use something that is equal parts tense, sympathetic, and utterly surreal.

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