‘Apocalypse In The Tropics’ Review: Petra Costa’s Pulse-Pounding Documentary About Brazil’s Anti-Democratic Evangelicals Is Gloriously Cinematic [Telluride]

It might be challenging for some viewers to take activists seriously when they are speaking in tongues. But that is exactly what Petra Costa does in her edgy yet empathetic documentary ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics.’ Overlapping somewhat with the events chronicled in 2019’s ‘The Edge of Democracy,’ her epic account of Brazil’s recent whipsawing political battles, this film takes a step back from the action to investigate how the nation’s governance devolved into a near-permanent state of crisis. A crucial and underappreciated factor, according to Costa, is the rocketing surge of a politicized strain of evangelism that aims to accelerate rather than alleviate chaos.

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Costa places a desire for a fiery spiritual cleansing alongside an earlier era’s cool-headed democratic ideals and finds both contrast and similarities. Following a black-and-white montage of the construction of Brasilia’s serenely modernist capital city, Costa cuts to a 2016 scene in the interior of the National Congress building where evangelicals are putting their hands on and blessing each representative’s desk. It was a fraught time of economic turmoil, with a religion-fueled reactionary movement looking to stop the country’s liberalization and bring back the authoritarian nationalism that typified Brazilian life under the decades-long military dictatorship that ended in 1985. Costa defines the tenor of the insurgent religious right as “divine supremacy and holy war.”

The film ties this ferment to the explosion of evangelical faith in Brazil. Over four decades, the once predominantly Catholic country became nearly one-third evangelical. Brazilian conservatism in earlier years was once based on fanatic anti-Communism; Costa inserts a shot of graffiti urging people to shoot a Communist every day. However, the modern version shown in the film has a broader list of targets, including anything remotely tied to liberalism, from unionizing to gay rights.  

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Broken up into six chapters, ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’ studies this upending of Brazilian political dynamics from the perspective of a curious secular outsider who is humbled by how little she understands the Bible and its believers. “We shared the same land,” she says, “but speak completely different languages.” Narrating with a tone of quiet gravity, Costa infuses her film with a bookish spirit that leavens its more pulse-pounding elements. She weaves together breathtaking overviews of mass demonstrations, grittily immediate you-are-there footage, and thoughtful passages of historical examination to produce a film that uses gloriously cinematic language to dissect powerfully dramatic events. The result evokes the similarly ruminative films of Patricio Guzmán (this film and his ‘My Imaginary Country’ would make for a fascinating double feature on modern Latin American political movements) but with less didacticism.

As with ‘The Edge of Democracy,’ Costa secures incredible access to principal players. In this film, she gets close to Silas Malafaia, a fire-breathing Pentecostal televangelist whose scorching diatribes about the evils of “Cultural Marxism” could be taken straight from the livestream of a Texas megachurch pastor whose members were hooked on Newsmax and QAnon. Cutting back to footage of Billy Graham inveighing against Communism in a massive Brazil rally in 1974, Costa uses Malafaia as an example of how the politically radicalized modern American evangelical style has been imported.  

The film’s dark star, Malafaia, shows clear anger management issues (filming from the back seat while Malafaia is driving, Costa shows him melting down with highly un-Christian road rage) but just as obvious charisma. He is a naturally compelling speaker with a straightforward if logically and morally dubious political argument. Some of the film’s deftest moments show Jair Bolsonaro, the populist authoritarian who tapped evangelical furor to win the presidency in 2018, appearing like a dull-witted flunky doing Malafaia’s bidding. One of the film’s must-see scenes shows Bolsonaro speaking tentatively in front of a massive crowd, looking nervously over to Malafaia, who nods encouragingly and mouths along with the words he has clearly given Bolsonaro to repeat.

Costa does not hide where her sympathies lie. This would be difficult, given the tenor of Bolsonaro and Malafaia’s often violent and radical pronouncements about establishing a Christian theocracy at the barrel of a gun. One eerie aerial shot of a mass grave shows the price of Bolsonaro and the evangelicals’ denouncing of COVID-19 vaccines. But even in the later sections of the film detailing the dramatic return to power of once-imprisoned leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—reelected in 2022 after the Supreme Court found his conviction was politically biased—Costa keeps her preference for Lula’s politics from taking a propagandistic turn. She is helped by Lula’s warmer and more expansive style. He does not call his opponents evil. Instead, he expresses sympathy for how appealing the evangelical message can be for the poor; saying the devil is behind everything wrong in life and that Jesus can save you is much simpler than the frustratingly complex arguments put forth by unions and the now-diminished Catholic Church.

Though Costa’s study of religion’s increasing role in Brazilian politics is meant as a warning, she is not reductive. At one point, she connects the beliefs of these conservative evangelicals with the post-colonial idealism of Brasilia’s builders, whose faith was “not in God but in the equally abstract ideas of progress and democracy.” That sense of inquiry and curiosity stops ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’ from veering into hyperbole without ever losing its harrowing urgency. [A-]

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