Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

It’s easy to have mixed feelings about The Mole Agent, especially once you discover that it’s billed as a “documentary,” but much of it takes a stylized, film noir aesthetic, some of the scenes clearly staged. It’s a skillful blend of fact and fiction, but is it really enough fact to be lauded as one of the year’s best documentaries? Evidently many people think so: it landed a a nomination for this year’s Best Documentary Feature award at the Oscars. (My Octopus Teacher is the likely winner. Time is the deserving winner.)

The title The Mole Agent gives away its pretty straightforward premise: it’s about a spy. The often-delightful twist is that the “mole” in question is elderly man Sergio Chamy, hired by a private investigator to go undercover in a retirement home in the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, to find out whether the staff is mistreating another one of its residents, due to the suspicions of her daughter.

I got a bit confused about the setting at first, as the home is called San Francisco Retirement Home. When Sergio is first told he’ll be going to “San Francisco,” I pondered the fact that everyone onscreen was speaking Spanish. I thought, well, California has a large Spanish-speaking population, maybe it just happens to be Latino people in this story. I finally figured out that this is a Chilean film.

The language difference aside, the themes on display in The Mole Agent are effectively universal, as it winds up being a bit of a meditation on growing old. The early scenes, in which several men answer a want ad for a man “between the ages of 80 and 90” who is proficient in technology, are hilarious. None of them are that comfortable with the nuances of smart phones, of course. This early sequence created a great sense of promise for this film, and an expectation that it might be a surprisingly delightful experience.

And, a lot of it is. But, a lot of it is also rather melancholy, as Sergio gradually comes to the realization that the woman he’s meant to be observing isn’t being much mistreated, she’s just lonely—as are most of the people in the home. Another woman, who has been in there 25 years, develops an unrequited crush on him, which he rejects in a very gentlemanly way as he explains he is still grieving the loss of his wife only a few months before. In one particularly heartbreaking scene, Sergio sits across from a woman who openly expresses fear because she doesn’t know where she is, and when he tells her she’ll feel some relief if she just allows herself to cry, she does exactly that.

Knowing that some of this film is invented, it can be difficult to gauge what is real and what isn’t, which is frustrating. Presumably an emotionally raw moment like that is authentic. To this film’s credit, in spite of its somewhat gimmicky presentation, it never comes across as insincere. It starts off surprisingly comic, and then morphs into a portrait of all of our possible futures. I found myself thinking about when some of my close friends, very smart people, might see their minds slip in old age, and how I could find myself bearing witness to it. What a horrifying thought. We won’t even get into the scenario of the roles being reversed.

It’s fascinating to see Sergio walking around these other elderly people, him being one of the few who still mostly has his wits about him. His stumbling errors with an iPhone aren’t a reflection of his mental acuity but just a lack of experience. One wonders how comfortable he is with viewers of this film just finding him adorable.

In the conceit of the story being told here, the retirement home is fully aware of the film’s camera crew, under the impression that they are just making a more general documentary about Sergio. What logical reason they would have for that, I don’t know, but since Sergio doesn’t find any real evidence of mistreatment, it makes sense they would sign off on the use of footage from inside their facility. That is, assuming none of that was staged, and who’s to say? To be fair, everything from inside the home feels authentic—it’s the scenes in the private investigator’s office that feel contrived. That doesn’t make them any less fun, though, and at least in those parts we’re not being reminded of our imminent mortality.

Overall: B