For opponents of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—that is, opponents of discrimination against indigenous people, deforestation, abortion bans, institutionalized homophobia, and Covid-19 denial—his loss in the country’s 2022 general election was a relief, but not a new dawn. The presidency may once again be assumed by the liberal veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (popularly known as just Lula) of the center-left Workers’ Party, but the demographic shifts and political machinations that enabled the recent far-right takeover still cast a long shadow over a nation beset by economic inequality and social unrest. “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” Petra Costa says, borrowing pointedly from Luke’s book, halfway through her gripping new documentary, “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” which wanders with a heavy heart through the recent past while casting an anxious eye on the future.
The expressions of shame, fear, and faint, flickering hope that recur throughout “Apocalypse in the Tropics” will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen Costa’s previous documentary, “The Edge of Democracy”—to which her latest film serves as an obvious prop. Released in 2019, in the wake of Bolsonaro’s election victory and while Lula was still in prison on false corruption charges, the film deeply examined the reasons behind Brazil’s dramatic rightward slide, and viewed the new administration with unabashed alarm. “The Edge of Democracy” was a festival hit, received a high-profile release on Netflix, and eventually earned an Oscar nomination, laying the groundwork for this follow-up—which premiered out of competition at Venice, with Brad Pitt among its executive producers—to similarly connect with audiences.
Five years and a global pandemic later, Costa may be happy to dwell on Bolsonaro’s tenure in the past, but she’s not done analyzing its origins and implications for the country as a whole. For sister works released in very different political climates, The Edge of Democracy and Tropical Apocalypse are remarkably compatible in their outlook and approach. That’s not to say they share the same talking points. Much of the new film, as its apocalyptic title suggests, focuses on a social phenomenon that Costa admits she didn’t adequately explore in her last film: Brazil’s extraordinary shift toward evangelical Christianity, a movement that now represents more than 30% of the country’s population, up from 5% just 40 years ago.
Costa points out that this religious shift is one of the most rapid in history—the kind of seismic demographic shift that cannot be pinned down to one side of the church-state divide. Having been raised secular, the filmmaker admits to being ignorant of evangelical principles and naive about how they have seeped into the Brazilian social fabric. She decides to read the Bible, and the New Testament in particular, closely—though the more she delves into the Bible, the more she concludes that Brazil’s most influential evangelicals are guided not by God’s Word but by the earthly pull of capitalism.
The main figure of interest in “Apocalypse in the Tropics” is thus neither Bolsonaro nor Lula—though Costa, a courageous and charming interviewer, does have some insightful time with Lula, a man who was raised traditionally Catholic and had to tactically include some nods to the evangelical base (including a promise not to change the abortion law) in his recent presidential campaign. Instead, the Pentecostal televangelist Silas Malavaia, a self-proclaimed political puppet master with hard-right beliefs, is presented as the charismatic central figure of Brazil’s new populist politics—more influential and more durable than the individuals he endorses as appropriate conduits for evangelical thinking in Brazil’s parliament and supreme court.
Malavia is certainly engaging, even as he skates the edge of outright hate speech in his surprisingly generous interviews with Costa, where he defends ultra-conservative Christian principles (including zero tolerance for homosexuality and abortion) as the enforceable will of the Brazilian majority. Leaving aside the obvious counterpoint that evangelicals are not yet a majority faction, Costa instead challenges him on the definition of democracy itself: Shouldn’t it involve protecting minorities regardless of what the masses want? No, Costa replies in his voice, as if amused by the very idea. “I can’t reconcile how the same Jesus who preached love and forgiveness can be used to justify a government that lacks compassion,” Costa observes in voiceover. Yet self-justification doesn’t come up much in evangelical politics: when you claim to have God on your side, you don’t have to explain or compromise what you stand for.
Even with the left seemingly back in power, Costa wonders how far Brazil is from becoming a theocracy. The film is cleverly organized and divided into chapters with biblical titles, using classic religious imagery in ironic contrast to the media hype of Malafaia, and it moves away from the straightforward personal narrative of its predecessor in pursuit of a bigger picture. Costa’s archival research takes her to the great influence of the American preacher Billy Graham, whose stadium tours in Brazil did much to cultivate evangelicalism among the general population—which, she says, was part of an American anti-communist campaign to counter the then-growing leftist leanings of Brazilian Catholicism.
Nowadays, her gaze is shifting to a poor public that feels marginalized and alienated, and that is strongly influenced by faith-based discourses. In the run-up to the 2022 elections, she speaks to a single mother who works as a cleaner, who admits that she agrees with Lula’s policies: “I will vote for him, but the Gospel influences my vote.” The Gospel, in this case, is Malavaya, a strong advocate of a prosperity doctrine that benefits him far more than it does any working-class evangelicals.
This fusion of religious fervor and partisan loyalty can be exploited to destructive ends, as the film demonstrates in its stunning depiction of the riots that erupted in January 2023 in the wake of Bolsonaro’s election defeat – in which a mob of angry pro-Bolsonaro voters stormed and wrecked the congressional buildings in Brasilia, under the president’s and Malavaia’s constant rallying cries for “military intervention.” The parallels with the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters two years ago are so stark that the film resists comment: it should be clear to international viewers that this cautionary tone is not directed at just one country.
Such extreme acts, Costa suggests, are the perpetrators’ interpretation of the apocalyptic violence heralded by some interpretations of the Book of Revelation. As her camera sweeps around the ruined beauty of Brazil’s once-glittering, futuristic National Congress, we wonder whether the end of the world has already come, and if so, what will happen next.
