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The premise of The Mole Agent, a Chilean film by director Maite Alberdi, is an appealing one. Sergio Chamy, an elderly man who recently lost his wife, answers a bizarre wanted ad for a man “between 80 and 90.” The ad was placed by a private eye whose client worries that her mother is being mistreated in the nursing home where she lives. The job is to infiltrate the home as a spy—complete with a pen and glasses that record video—and determine whether or not that’s the case. But while undercover, the mild-mannered Sergio becomes the most popular resident in the nursing home—one woman literally asks him to marry her—and also solves the mystery of why other residents’ possessions seem to be disappearing.
Sounds like a light, charming comedy, no? That’s what I anticipated when I first saw trailers for the film. But what I missed in the trailer—and, honestly, one could miss in the film itself, apart from a couple of brief, early glimpses of a camera crew—is the detail that elevates it to an entirely different level of fascination: The Mole Agent is a documentary.
Tidy, attractive Sergio is not an actor, but rather precisely what he is presented as: An 83-year-old widower who answered an ad placed by private eye Rómulo Aitken. Aitken, a former police detective, had infiltrated rest homes on behalf of the worried children of residents a few times before. But his usual mole had fallen and hurt himself and, thus, the ad. The film’s director, Alberdi, was drawn to the spy-in-a-nursing-home conceit and filmed 300 hours’ worth of footage to whittle down into her 90-minute film. She’d acquired permission from the nursing home to film a documentary there without disclosing the existence of the mole. (If there’s a queasy underside to the film, it’s that’s it’s unclear whether she also had to get the consent of the residents—many of whom are clearly beyond giving meaningful consent—or their families.)
Alberdi told The Guardian that she views her role as a documentarian as akin to Sergio’s as a spy: She watches and waits for a narrative to unfold. And what unfolds for her in The Mole Agent is vastly more intriguing than she could have anticipated. Once settled into the nursing home, Sergio discovers that the woman whose treatment he is meant to investigate is somewhat sickly and aggressively antisocial, rebuffing all of his efforts to talk with her. So, in the absence of any sign of mistreatment, he quickly loses interest in her—and, following his lead, so does the film.
As one of only four men in the home alongside 40 women—and universally considered a “gentleman”—Sergio is immediately a center of attention, quickly being nominated at a party as the “king” of the nursing home. Given that he is already working undercover, he also takes it upon himself to determine whether someone in the facility—a staffer? a resident?—is responsible for the disappearance of various small items from people’s rooms.
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But most appealingly, Sergio becomes the confidante of several of the women in the home. And it is here that Alberdi is able to steer the film in another direction altogether. Few, if any, of the residents receive regular visits from family, or even phone calls. (One, suffering from dementia and desperate for rescue, receives dubious but well-intentioned calls from the nursing home staff, pretending to be her “Mommy.”)
Over time, Sergio becomes frustrated with his boss, Aitken, and his original assignment. His daily “reports,” which he delivers by telephone, veer farther and farther off topic, and he becomes fixated on moderately insubordinate question: If Aitken’s client is so concerned with her mother’s treatment in the nursing home, why is it that she never comes to visit? Indeed, in its final third, The Mole Agent becomes an investigation not of the conditions in the nursing home, which seem adequate, but of the deep loneliness of many of its residents. The result is a profoundly original film that moves beyond its initial comic premise to offer moving insights on the lives and needs of the elderly—and not merely in Chile