Film review: Apocalypse in the Tropics’ dissection of Brazilian politics is a chilling warning for the rest of democratic world

At VIFF Centre, Petra Costa’s compelling new documentary ties the rise of right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro into the boom in Christian fundamentalism

By Janet Smith

Former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, centre, in Apocalypse in the Tropics.

Apocalypse in the Tropics is at VIFF Centre from July 11 to 13, and streams on Netflix after that

AN ELECTORATE OVERTAKEN by right-wing evangelists who are anti-abortion and anti–2SLGBTQIA+ rights. A president who refuses to accept election defeat, who falsely charges election fraud, who stacks the supreme court, and who calls mainstream media “fake news”. And an enraged crowd who storms and vandalizes a national congress.

Despite what it sounds like, director Petra Costa’s chilling new documentary is not about recent U.S. politics. Instead, it focuses on Brazil—specifically, on the era of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s rise and fall between 2016 and 2022.

What comes across is a scary mirror image of the populist politics in America—and elsewhere across the planet. But even more so, it’s a meditation on the extreme fragility of democracy, with the secular-raised Costa weighing in, in wry, essay-like reflections, before each of the film’s “chapters”, pondering religion, Biblical Revelations, and notions of freedom and empathy. Apocalypse in the Tropics also serves as an illuminating lesson on the underreported growth of Christian evangelism in Brazil, and the dangers when the lines between Church and State start to blur.

The documentary opens on the trio of Oscar Niemeyer’s gleaming modernist buildings, erected on an empty plateau in Brasilia in the early 1960s as a monument to the country’s new capital and its democracy. By the end of the film, those structures sit in ruin, glass shattered, work crews sweeping up the mess.

In between, Costa follows the rise of evangelism in Brazil, with almost one-third of the population now fundamentalist Christians. She traces it back to the early 1970s, when American TV evangelist Billy Graham launched a Brazilian stadium tour as part of an anti-Communist push by the U.S. to counteract the leftward lean of the South American country’s Catholics.

In the run-up to the 2022 election battle between Bolsonaro and Luiz “Lula” Inácio Lula da Silva—who had been imprisoned—we get a street-level view of the “Bolsominions”: vast crowds of Brazilians crying, praying, and dropping to their knees at political rallies. The title links to those believers’ preparations for a righteous war and other signs in Biblical Revelations. Pestilence? That was the pandemic, of course, the film reminding viewers that mask-wary Brazil had the second-highest death toll in the world—with then-President Bolsonaro shrugging, saying in a now-infamous quote, “We’re all going to die one day.”

Interestingly, the main character of Apocalypse in the Tropics is not Bolsonaro, but the charismatic Pentecostal TV preacher Silas Malafaia—who the documentary accurately dubs The Kingmaker, a mantel he wears with pride. Costa gains incredible access to the political power player, who rages against homosexuals and abortion, declaring Bolsonaro as chosen by God one moment then bragging about his own power over the president the next. In one telling scene, Costa rides in his backseat while he unleashes at length against a motorcyclist who cut him off.

By the time the film reaches its climactic depiction of the January 2023 riots that followed Bolsonaro’s election defeat to Lula, Malafaia is brazenly calling for “military intervention” to put his puppet back in place.

The film may end with the cleanup of Brasilia’s Modernist Utopia after the riots, but the story continues. Yes, Bolsonaro today faces charges of attempting to stage a coup against the current president, and running an illegal spying network while in office. But as Costa makes so compellingly clear, peace and democracy in Brazil hang precariously in the balance as religious fervour continues to surge.

Consider her film an urgent warning for the rest of the democratic world. Most tellingly, the connections between Brazil’s right-wing forces and America’s continue: just this week, President Donald Trump slapped the South American country with a 50-percent tariff, citing the legal action against Bolsonaro. Like we said: chilling. 

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