Post-Catholic Brazil 101

“Apocalypse in the Tropics” is streaming on Netflix.

Petra Costa’s new documentary tackles the politics of Brazilian evangelicalism with tools redolent of a true crime story. But for all of its forensic analysis — interviews, archival footage, a score that would feel at home in “The Staircase” — “Apocalypse in the Tropics”  falls dispiritingly short of a hard-boiled exposé that uncovers the truth. Instead, it merely brushes the surface of religious power, failing to meaningfully interrogate its underlying mechanics and visceral allure. 

It begins with the story of Pentecostal preacher Silas Malafaia, an ally of former strongman president Jair Bolsonaro. His rise to prominence is interspersed with archival footage of the construction of Brasilia, once intended to be the modernist capital of Catholic social democracy in Latin America. The message is clear: This optimism has been undermined by the steady rise of Pentecostalism beginning in the 1950s, when the country’s Evangelical population began growing; from 5% at midcentury, the movement now accounts for more than one-fifth of the population (and rising). This shift has powered the rise of a new political right, thanks to the leaders of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded in 1977, and later, Malafaia’s own Assembly of God Victory in Christ in 1993.   

Unfortunately, Costa chooses to investigate this history with the authorial voice of a novice; despite how much she might actually know, her voiceover feigns naivete. Her attempts to explain how these new churches and movements have undermined and rewired Brazilian politics — to say nothing of how ethical hypocrisy is entangled in all religious power grabs — fail to cohere journalistically or aesthetically. We learn a few names and dates, but not how or why Brazil became what it is. 

Brazilian Pentecostalism is a faith built at the crossroads of the aesthetics of luxury and a tradition of ecstatic worship, promising its devotees untold riches while harkening back to grand Talmudic temples and calls to spiritual warfare. The film, however, fails to grapple with basic aspects of its magnetism for the poor — its ritual grandeur, its gospel of wealth, its origins in promises to heal and cure. The movie’s focus on tradition seldom extends beyond fleeting shots of painting, architecture and the enraptured prayerful. 

What little light the film provides is generated by interviews with everyday voters in the lead-up to Brazil’s 2022 presidential election. For example, Costa sits down with Malafaia, a pastor who was once aligned with Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party, but switched allegiances to Bolsonaro. While there is a terrifying frankness to this and other interviews — with subjects alternating between claims of altruism and bilious anti-Indigenous rhetoric — the film seldom probes the psychology of these contradictions, or the mechanics of power that allow them to become so dangerous. 

Costa’s investigative approach often careens in head-scratching speculative directions. For example, she carefully rewinds and replays public broadcast footage of an exchange between Bolsonaro and Malafaia — as if it were a clue in a murder mystery — even though their connections have been well-documented. She repeats her inquiries out loud, but seldom makes any progress toward her targets. The result is less revelatory than similarly themed documentaries, notably Oliver Stone’s “Lula” and Costa’s own Oscar-nominated “The Edge of Democracy.”

Costa has made a film for newcomers unfamiliar with the last decade of Brazilian politics that barely clears the bar of a minimum introduction. “Apocalypse in the Tropics” explores the end result of the Pentecostal Church’s outsize influence in the worlds of Brazilian television and finance, but barely mentions these causes. There’s a sense of grand historical motion to Costa’s sweeping drone shots of crowds clad in yellow and green, but these seldom feature the requisite context of which side of the religious divide we’re actually seeing. Political violence erupts, but little context is provided. Costa speaks of a Utopian Brazil as imagined by the generation preceding the military dictatorship that took control in 1964, but this approach is limited to broad platitudes — to say nothing of its identitarian overlap with the right-wing forces the movie hopes to expose. The film is neither outwardly critical nor self-critical enough to deconstruct the building blocks of theocracy. 

“Apocalypse in the Tropics” contracts every time it ought to expand in its investigative scope. Despite its many questions, it commits the documentarian cardinal sin of presuming an audience with neither basic knowledge nor curiosity, resulting in a visual and emotional incuriousness all its own.