Apocalypse in the Tropics

PG-13 • Netflix

What would you make of a small group of Christians walking from seat to seat in a congressional building during a recess and praying with an elected member for his colleagues? A peaceful moment of intercession? Or the death knell of democracy?

Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa sets the tone early in her new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics by describing this scene taking place inside her country’s Palácio do Congresso Nacional as “very strange.” Costa continues her narration by lamenting that Brazil’s formerly “progressive” legislative body has “turn[ed] over the reins of government to a different entity.” To “evangelicals,” she means. Christians participating in the political process apparently spooks some folks.

Apocalypse in the Tropics picks up where Costa’s Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy left off. The 2020 documentary focused on the turbulent politics inside the world’s seventh most populous nation, and it recounts Costa’s left-leaning family’s troubles with past regimes. Apocalypse in the Tropics examines the recent political rise of evangelicals in Brazil: They’ve nearly tripled their numbers in the nation’s legislature since 2002, and a Presbyterian pastor gained a seat on the supreme court. In 2018, an expanding evangelical voter base helped “ultra-right” (Costa’s words) candidate Jair Bolsonaro win the presidency. The film tracks Bolsonaro’s four years in office and scrutinizes the turmoil that followed his failed reelection bid in 2022. The parallels to events in the United States two years prior are uncanny, no doubt. Brazil even experienced its own January 6 event—on January 8, 2023, when rioters vandalized government buildings.

Conservatives in general—more so than Christians specifically—took heat from American mainstream media outlets for Donald Trump’s countercultural agenda. But Costa zeroes in on evangelicals, whom she asserts harbor “dominionist” ambitions for Brazilian government and culture. She builds her case principally on speeches by and interviews with influential Pentecostal Pastor Silas Malafaia, a prominent voice who supported Bolsonaro's ascension to the Brazilian presidency.

“We are against abortion … and the legalization of drugs. … Brazil belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ,” Malafaia sounds off to a large crowd. While Malafaia sometimes comes across brash, he exposes progressives’ duplicity.

“Why are others free to preach [in public] the ideas of Marx but I’m not allowed to preach the ideas of Jesus?” Malafaia asks. The film is Costa’s response: Religion is backwards and undemocratic. Yet Costa admits at the beginning of Apocalypse in the Tropics that she didn’t know much about “the evangelical faith” before she started filming. She says she “finally started studying the Bible” but conveys little more than a superficial understanding of its last book, Revelation—and that with laughable heavy-handedness: The camera pans slowly across several apocalyptic-themed paintings, such as Bruegel’s 1562 work The Fall of the Rebel Angels. (The paintings’ nude images, a bare backside, and a few expletives account for the film’s rating.) The Bolsonaro administration’s “lack of empathy” in response to the high COVID death toll in Brazil? Straight out of evangelicals’ doomsday playbook, obviously.

Another of the film’s scare tactics is to juxtapose images of peacefully assembled Christians with unidentified individuals in newsclips who say hateful things such as, “Let’s shoot all left-wingers here in Acre.” Top American film critics are dutifully echoing Costa’s warning of a falling sky: “eerie”, “dark, uncomfortable”, “democracies ... subverted and dismantled.”

Many progressives are blind to their own preconceptions, and Costa posits irreligiosity as the bias-free value system. She praises cultural revolutionaries who “put their faith not in God but … in progress and democracy” then vilifies a sizable portion of her fellow citizens for participating in the democratic process.

Sounds to me like myopics in the tropics.