Here is one thing that makes Petra Costa’s new documentary, “Apocalypse in the Tropics” (in theaters and streaming Monday on Netflix), so powerful: It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.
She begins with the extraordinary shift in her homeland of Brazil toward evangelical Christianity — over the past 40 years, the percentage of Brazilians identifying as evangelical has grown to 30 percent from 5 percent, by some estimates. That’s an immense, almost unprecedented change.
What’s more, it’s had radical effects on that nation’s politics, leading directly to the election of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Costa wasn’t raised to be particularly religious, so she approaches the subject as something of an anthropologist who knows Brazil well. (Her parents are left-wing Brazilian activists who opposed the military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985, and her fiery 2019 film, “The Edge of Democracy,” explored both her and her country’s political past.) Instead of focusing solely on Bolsonaro and his electoral battle with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president, Costa hones in on something else: the way the Pentecostal televangelist and celebrity Silas Malafaia has operated at the core of politics.
She suggests that Malafaia, with the money and influence he wields, was extremely consequential in the rise and popularity of Bolsonaro. In other words, she argues that his media savvy, tied to capitalism and a certain strain of apocalypticism, accounts for the rightward lurch in Brazil’s politics.
What she’s pointing out is how these three things — the lure of money, the lure of celebrity and the lure of power — constitute an unholy trinity, especially when held and venerated by a figure like Malafaia, who can dole them out. That has always been true. Humans love to be rich, popular and important, and a lot of the time those things can be woven into people’s religious beliefs, making those convictions even stronger.
But it may be that elements of the present, like social media, internet misinformation and extinction-level threats to human life make that combination more potent than ever. That’s what “Apocalypse in the Tropics” draws out so well: This pattern in Brazil is infinitely repeatable. If you recognize it, well, it’s not because your country’s leaders are unique. It’s because while history may not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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