A Netflix documentary shows what happened to “the Trump of the Tropics.”

When I watched Petra Costa’s Oscar-nominated 2019 documentary The Edge of Democracy, it was impossible not to be struck by the similarities between her native Brazil’s slide toward authoritarianism and the United States’ own political trajectory. In her new movie Apocalypse in the Tropics, the resonances have only grown more pronounced, and more frightening.

Opening with a group of Christian activists blessing the desks in the country’s National Congress Palace before the opening of a legislative session in 2016, the movie, which is now streaming on Netflix, charts the rapid rise of evangelical Christianity as a political force in Brazil. Costa calls it “one of the fastest religious shifts in human history,” with the percentage of Brazilians who identify as evangelical jumping sixfold over the past 40 years, to nearly a third of the population. The country remains majority Catholic, but the change Costa documents isn’t so much about numbers as it is about evangelicals’ understanding of themselves as a political force, and their leaders’ determination to steer the country.

The daughter of pro-democracy activists and the granddaughter of one of the founders of one of the country’s largest oil companies, Costa has the kind of access filmmakers would kill for, and enough political intuition to have started filming Jair Bolsonaro, who was swept into Brazil’s presidency in 2019 on a wave of far-right populism, years before he was even a viable candidate. But while the movie gets up close with both Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist who ousted Bolsonaro from office in 2023, her primary interest is not in the country’s rulers but in in the people they take their cues from, especially the televangelist Silas Malafaia.

Malafaia, who founded his own branch of the Assemblies of God church in 1993, has been involved in Brazilian politics since 2002, when he backed Lula’s first successful presidential bid. But he broke with Lula as the church’s, and his own, power grew, and in 2018 was instrumental in elevating Bolsonaro, then a little-known federal deputy, to the presidency. A recent convert who, Costa suggests, only embraced his wife’s evangelical faith out of political expediency, Bolsonaro pushed a nakedly authoritarian form of politics that was heavy on rural resentment and violent rhetoric, and despite his relatively thin qualifications, his followers came, or were coaxed, to believe that his lack of obvious capabilities was precisely what allowed him to be a vessel for the will of God. Costa doesn’t exactly wink at the camera at this point—she largely remains off-screen, although her narration, in both English and Portuguese, conveys a sense of her personal connection to the country’s fate, and her devastation as it turns rightward—but she doesn’t need to connect the dots for American viewers to feel like this all sounds awfully familiar. (This year’s Oscar–winning I’m Still Here, set during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s, offered a similarly chilling sense of déjà vu.)

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It’s been years, perhaps decades, since American documentary filmmakers were able to get as close to their nation’s president as Costa does here with hers. (There’s a case to be made that, in the U.S., D.A. Pennebaker both helped inaugurate the genre, with 1960’s Primary, and, with 1993’s The War Room, closed it out.) So if Apocalypse in the Tropics casts a revealing light on U.S. politics, it’s less because the two countries’ histories are precisely parallel—among other things, there’s no U.S. equivalent for the way our government has meddled with Brazil’s—than because the evangelical influence on Brazilian politics is a little less camouflaged, a little easier to spot. When he lost reelection in 2023, Bolsonaro refused to admit defeat and urged his followers to resist the result, which led to some setting up camp outside army bases and demanding the military install him directly. At first, Costa says, Bolsonaro was less inclined to push for an uprising, leaving the country for his house in Orlando, Florida. It’s Malafaia, she suggests, who stiffened his resolve. She pauses and rewinds, Zapruder-like, a clip of the speech when Bolsonaro, perhaps paraphrasing the book of Deuteronomy, tells a gathering of his followers to “Go fight, and I will be with you.” Given that the only other time in the film Bolsonaro cites chapter and verse is John 8:32 (“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”), it’s a little surprising to see him departing from the Bible’s Wikiquotes page. But that’s only until Costa replays the footage and catches Bolsonaro nervously shooting a sideways glance at Malafaia beside him on the dais, and Malafaia nodding in gleeful approval once he’s recited the desired text.

Bolsonaro’s lightly coded call for insurrection leads to an assault on the foundations of the country’s democracy, only two days after the second anniversary of Jan. 6. In Brasilia’s Three Powers Square, rioters stormed and laid waste to buildings devoted to each branch of the country’s government. But the similarities end there. In Brazil, the courts—presumably once their smashed windows had been replaced—held Bolsonaro accountable and banned him from running for office until 2030. It’s those consequences that Donald Trump now seeks to punish with brute economic force, threatening a crippling 50 percent tariff on Brazil in retaliation for what he calls a “witch hunt.”

Costa is far more concerned with her own country’s politics than ours; the only time the U.S. comes up in Apocalypse in the Tropics is when she describes the country’s 1970s plan to replace anti-colonialist liberation theology with a form of Christianity more friendly to individualism and corporate interests. But there’s no way to watch the movie and come away with an intact sense of American exceptionalism. We believed our institutions were too strong, our system too brilliantly conceived, to fall prey to the threats that menaced other democracies around the world. But that belief was our Achilles’ heel, a form of unexamined arrogance that prevented—and, in many cases, still prevents—Americans from seeing what is going on right in front of them. Brazil’s example might even offer hope to Americans wondering if the pendulum will ever swing back. But first we’d have to drop the idea that it can’t happen here, and understand the ways in which it already has.

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