To those of us in the United States, watching Apocalypse in the Tropics, Petra Costa’s transfixing documentary about the growth of Evangelical Christianity in Brazil, may feel at times like staring at a looking-glass version of the U.S. We’ll surely recognize the growing alliance between pastors and politicians, each spouting some form of millenarian and absolutist rhetoric. Then there are the calls for judges’ heads, the preemptive accusations of electoral fraud, and the now all-too-familiar spectacle of a wild-eyed right-wing mob ransacking federal buildings after their guy Jair Bolsonaro lost the country’s presidential election. But even as such images echo beyond that nation’s borders (and wannabe-strongman Bolsonaro’s people were of course inspired by the events of January 6, 2021), Costa wisely remains focused on Brazil’s unique reality. Her film resonates not necessarily because she’s trying to warn the outside world but because she seeks to understand just how things in her own country got this way. (That said, Donald Trump did just announce his intention to levy a 50 percent tariff on goods from Brazil, despite the fact that the U.S. actually enjoys a hefty trade surplus with that country. His stated, creatively capitalized reason? “The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term.”)
Much of Apocalypse in the Tropics (which opens theatrically today and will premiere on Netflix Monday, July 14) follows Silas Malafaia, an enormously popular right-wing Pentecostal pastor who over the years has courted the political class, establishing a clearly symbiotic relationship with power. In 2002, he actually supported the left-wing presidential front-runner, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; years later, his alliance with Bolsonaro propelled the latter from an obscure right-wing hothead to a leading contender for the presidency. Costa has managed to film Malafaia multiple times, capturing his fire-breathing public appearances as well as more candid moments. (The whole film is a remarkable feat of access.) Malafaia’s articulacy and megalomania come through in both instances. He clearly understands the appeal of his brand of Christianity to a population suffering from economic and political turmoil; he notes that since the 1980s, Evangelicalism has grown from a small minority to more than 30 percent of the country. He also understands the incredible power this gives him, which explains his decision to embrace, endorse, and in many cases groom politicians in what appears to be a clear break with the country’s tradition of secularism.
Costa’s film is both a personal lament and an Olympian overview of an enormous and complex sociocultural phenomenon. Her dense narrative threads several different through-lines. She opens with footage from the late 1950s and early ’60s documenting the creation of the newly established capital city of Brasília and its Plaza of Three Powers, built in 1960. She relates how the three branches of the federal government were laid out in a triangular pattern representing the country’s hopes for a democratic future. (Originally, the enormous Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasília was to be right next door, but city planners decided to move it elsewhere in a nod to the division between church and state.) As Costa tells it, even the turmoil of the ensuing years, which included a brutal military dictatorship and multiple impeachments, were still at heart secular: Humans, however flawed and at times incredibly cruel, remained at the root of these decisions. In the past decade, however, particularly in the wake of the 2014 financial crisis and a period of political chaos, the rise of Evangelicalism has meant an entire generation of leaders have ceded control to religion. Democracy has to take a backseat. Brazil, in their eyes, belongs to the Lord. And since the Lord ain’t talking, guess who gets to decide what the Lord is thinking: Silas Malafaia and his ilk.
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The director admits that she herself was unable to grasp this phenomenon for many years. Raised in a secular household, she knew very little about religion and how it spoke to the country’s dispossessed. Early in the film, we see her visit Evangelical congressional representatives in 2016 and receive a Bible from them; they tell her to make sure she reads the New Testament first. Her own exploration of Christian dogma, elegantly expressed in the film via religious paintings, becomes one of the picture’s structuring elements, alongside the interwoven timelines of Evangelicalism’s rise over the decades and the 2022 election that saw the recently imprisoned Lula defeat Bolsonaro. The picture thus adroitly strikes a moving balance between personal essay, sociocultural portrait, and political thriller. (It’s not dissimilar, in that sense, to Costa’s Oscar-nominated 2019 documentary, The Edge of Democracy, also released by Netflix.) It’s rich and dense, but it’s also propelled along by current events, accelerating as things reach their fearsome climax with the assault on Brasília — on those very federal buildings that 60-plus years ago held such promise. The terror and the tragedy on display are matched by the beauty of Costa’s filmmaking.
Costa clearly has a strong perspective, but she’s also too curious and compassionate to turn her documentary into a simple tale of good versus evil. She understands that what she’s witnessing isn’t a nefarious, top-down phenomenon but a reality born of desperation and hopelessness. Lula himself gives a revealing interview in which he talks about how Evangelicalism offers a simple and compelling solution to the person in need: A desperate worker who’s just lost his job and is looking for help gets a lot of blather about activism and protest and revolution from his union and a lot of pieties about suffering and pain on earth from the Catholic Church, while the Evangelical answer — trust in Jesus and you will be saved — is direct, hopeful, and doesn’t require any sacrifice. Lula then says he himself would never try to campaign in a church. Later, we see him forced to do exactly that, making overt appeals to believers during the country’s presidential runoff — a runoff which he won. Bolsonaro’s defeat, in other words, wasn’t indicative of religious fanaticism losing any of its power. Indeed, it might have been just another notch in the belt. Even as Costa ends her film on a hopeful note, explaining that the root of the word “apocalypse” means rebirth, we’re left with a troubling and uncertain future in Brazil and elsewhere.
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