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Heaven on Earth can mean different things. So too the end of the world. Early in searching Brazilian documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics, a group of people sing about that event with what sounds like relief. The singers are part of the evangelical Christian movement that now makes up almost 30 per cent of the Brazilian public. Cue Petra Costa’s film: a record of the 2018 and 2022 elections in which populist strongman Jair Bolsonaro won and then lost the presidency, and a study of the religious bloc that helped him take power.
The figure who draws together the two sides of the story is Silas Malafaia: a wealthy televangelist and, by this telling, political puppet master. The film takes on the tone of investigative journalism, though Malafaia scarcely needs exposing. The harder task would seem to be keeping him off camera, and from boasting of his clout with Bolsonaro.
Despite Costa having a background on the Brazilian left, some mix of ego and calculation has convinced Malafaia to take part. He even persuades the then-president to appear too, looking wooden. (You might wonder how a film this politically spiky ends up on the risk-averse Netflix. A clue comes with the involvement of Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B.)
Sometimes, the film plays like reportage. One mournful section deals with Brazil’s Covid pandemic under Bolsonaro. Elsewhere, the approach is interior. Never a believer, Costa looks with personal curiosity at the Book of Revelation. But the film may be at its most compelling in the mid-20th-century split-screen she pinpoints. In 1950s Brazil, a new national capital, Brasília, was built for the modern, secular state. Meanwhile, in the US, a young Southern Baptist minister, Billy Graham, was promoting a brawny vision of Christ as anti-communist warrior that would shortly be exported further south.
And now there is the swaggering Malafaia, talking of evangelical voters like a mere extension of himself. Yet for all its questions elsewhere, the film too feels only passingly interested in a close-up look at that 30 per cent. The result is that scenes from 2022 of Brazilians calling for military dictatorship as if to get closer to God feel not just uneasy, but under-explained: a mystery of the film’s own.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from July 11 and on Netflix from July 14
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