Two Prosecutors (Zwei Staatsanwälte)

 

Director Sergei Loznitsa

director at Cannes with Alexsandr Kuznetsov

Georgy Demidov

TWO PROSECUTORS (Zwei Staatsanwälte)          B+                                                      France  Germany  Netherlands  Latvia  Romania  Lithuania  Ukraine  (118 mi)  2025  d: Sergei Loznitsa

The time has come to look the Soviet monster directly in the eye.  It must be understood in order to be defeated.                                                                                                                              —Director Sergei Loznitsa

Grim, austere, and relentlessly bleak, Loznitsa reminds us what falling into authoritarianism really feels like, as evidenced by the height of Stalin repression in 1937, which is meticulously dissected and explored from the inside, in the jail cells and in the halls of power, exposed with surgical precision, where arrest warrants leading to deaths proceed with miraculous efficiency.  What this Kafkaesque parable suggests is a government’s insistence on the appearance of legality while undermining the entire system by arresting and jailing all dissenting voices, using the prisons as a wave of terror against these individuals, denying them any and all legal rights once they’ve become the exclusive property of a Gulag prison system, never again allowed to see the light of day, as the government runs on complete systematic repression.  Winner of The François Chalais Award (Prix François Chalais) at Cannes in 2025, an award that recognizes the esteemed values of journalism, and the Palić Best Film Award, the top prize at the European Film Festival in Palić, Serbia, the slowly developing story is told in a way that requires extreme patience, as the pace is glacial, allowing plenty of time to ruminate over what we see, with a patient yet unmistakable sense of foreboding, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to breed, expressed by the impassive coldness of officers and authorities, as well as the silences of the corridors.  From the maker of My Joy (Schastye moe) (2010), a haunting parable of post-Communist Russia, In the Fog (V Tumane) (2012), a sobering meditation on the complicated moral decisions faced by both soldiers and citizens during wartime, and Babi Yar. Context (2021), which shows how Ukrainians were complicit in the Nazi Babi Yar massacre of Jews, there is probably no director who has documented the criminal history of Russia in such an extensive way as Loznitsa, who has lived in Germany since 2001, yet still prefers to call himself a Russian, objecting to a total boycott on Russian artists and culture, which got him expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy, where this film, spoken mostly in Russian (viewed as the language of the aggressor), has been banned in both Russia and Ukraine.  The born-in-Belarus yet raised in Ukraine director knows a thing or two about Russia, as his documentary films in particular provide an archival, historical document of the horrors from Russian/Soviet history, where the grounds of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was one of the first targeted sites that was hit by Russian missiles and shells during the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Russia strikes Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial site in Ukraine).  This film serves as a monument to authoritarianism, where maintaining power and control through abject fear is the paramount concern, where the number of prisoners in Russia rose from about 180,000 in 1930 to more than 5 million by the mid 30’s, where a wave of arrests by the secret police, or the NKVD, the Gestapo-like organization that was responsible for the arrests, tortures, deaths, and massacres of millions of people, with millions more falling victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, mass shootings, and starvation.  It’s important to remember that Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times, named Man of the Year twice in 1939 and 1942, as the world was simply oblivious to the grandiose scale of cover-ups of the mass atrocities.  From July 1937 to mid-November 1938 alone, about 1.5 million people, including most of the leaders of the October 1917 Revolution, were arrested, shot, kidnapped, or detained in Gulag camps, where it may come as no surprise that in today’s Russia, the Stalin era is glorified.  The entire film takes place largely in two locations, a cavernous penal colony, which was actually shot in a hundred-year old Brasa prison in Riga, Latvia that is now closed, and the massive halls of justice in Moscow, where the film title only begins to describe how the legal process, which is supposedly available to everyone, in fact shuts the door, yet maintains, on the surface, an avenue of legality, but the NKVD intervenes and undermines any hint of legality at every turn, reaching an unimaginable level of systematic arrests, humiliation, and torture, which may as well be a blueprint into the present.  

Recalling the banality of evil from Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), the source material for the film is a novel by the same name written by Georgy Demidov, a Russian-born Soviet experimental physicist and political prisoner from the Kharkiv Technical Institute in Ukraine who was wrongfully arrested in 1938 and spent 14-years in the brutally harsh conditions of the KOLYMA PRISON CAMP in Siberia, a Gulag he referred to as “Auschwitz without the ovens,” where emaciated and starving prisoners were routinely fed only 400 calories per day.  After he was released, he documented the cruel realities of camp life through short stories and novellas, primarily focusing upon the physical and psychological destruction of scientists, intellectuals, and artists under Soviet rule, a phenomenon known as Eliticide.  In 1980, the KGB raided his home, destroyed his typewriters, without which he could not write, as his fingers had been frozen in the Gulag, and confiscated all his manuscripts, where Demidov died in 1987 believing his life’s work was lost forever.  However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union just a few years later, his daughter recovered his surviving manuscripts from KGB archives, and his collected works were later published in six volumes in Russia.  Unlike other famous camp writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov, whom he befriended in prison, Demidov wrote with a sharp focus on individual characters and the Kafkaesque absurdities of state power.  What stands out here is just how chillingly accurate it is, recreated in cold, meticulous detail, getting right into the psychological mindset of the people portrayed and the ruthless system of oppression that erodes every avenue of hope and freedom, continually finding new ways to brutalize their own people, with the Russia of today hurtling back toward Stalinism.  At the center of the picture is a young principled Bolshevik prosecutor, Alexander Kornev (Alexsandr Kuznetsov), only three months removed from law school in the city of Bryansk, some 200 miles southwest of Moscow, yet he’s filled with the revolutionary ideals and beliefs of a true patriot about building a better socialist society, keeping his own personal thoughts to himself, making him hard to read, revealing next to nothing about himself, always remaining calmly measured and restrained.  He becomes a prosecutor at the very moment when the country was in a process of radical change in a way that wasn’t necessarily understood by the rest of the population.  Against all odds, as prisoner letters are routinely burned before ever leaving the heavily guarded premises, but one, written in his own blood on a tiny piece of cardboard, somehow makes it to the desk of this young prosecutor, who is summoned to the local prison by an Old Bolshevik named Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), like a cry for help, or an answer to his prayers.  Kornev’s ominous arrival to the prison is met by a chorus of silent women standing across the street, mothers, sisters, and daughters of men who are imprisoned inside, waiting for any word, as inmates are strictly forbidden from contacting anyone on the outside.  Built around dialogue gripped by fear, where every spoken word may have devastating consequences, as seemingly harmless encounters can lead to arrests, the staging is minimalist, so precisely constructed and so skillfully staged, essentially built around fewer than ten scenes, mostly unfolding in a series of private conversations, dominated by fixed shots and symmetrical compositions, bare environments, and suffocating silences that speak, disturbingly, of the present.  The goal of expunging all critics and enemies is to consolidate an elite group of loyal supporters whose allegiance lies strictly with Stalin, much like Trump and Putin have similarly targeted political enemies and systematically eliminated all opposition by surrounding themselves with nothing but blindly obedient followers.

Literally half the film is spent waiting with Kornev waiting to pass through the various layers of prison bureaucracy, who have no interest whatsoever in allowing him to see the prisoner, culminating with the Prison Governor (Vytautas Kaniušonis) offering him a litany of excuses, but he persists, waiting for hours, until they finally agree to the meeting, where he has to pass through a labyrinth of locked gates and doors, always accompanied by a hostile group of implacable faces from the warily suspicious assembled guards who are not pleased by his presence.  When we finally meet the feeble, starved, and thoroughly broken-down prisoner, he’s the kind of character we rarely see in films, a historical icon, having been there at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, filled with the promise of building a new and better society, only to fall victim of the tactics of the NKVD, who have spent years torturing him, and other loyal party members like him, into confessing crimes they never committed, where “honest, knowledgeable experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans,” a line that is sure to draw snickers from American audiences, as it’s a pattern recognized so well in the Trump administration.  Stepniak’s body may have endured endless atrocities, where he’s nearing the end from organ failure, yet his mind is still sharp, making him a fascinating subject of interest, with Kornev recalling how he attended one of Stepniak's speeches about truth and Bolshevism at his law school, where he was immediately impacted by the force of his ideas, impressed that he also belonged to the former party leadership in his hometown.  It’s hard not to be intrigued by this man, finding his beliefs and the essential value of his work suddenly deemed anti-revolutionary, making him an enemy of the state.  Yet he actually stands for something, as opposed to Stalin’s secret police who simply want to erase his existence, as that’s what authoritarians do.  There’s a major difference in conceiving ideas and beliefs, literally building something out of nothing, with the hopes of transforming an entire society, and the parallel course of killing and destroying anything that has to do with planting that seed, where murder is the ultimate political weapon.  With a heavy reliance on dialogue, it’s rare for films to so exquisitely expose profound and radical ideas with this degree of simplicity, where nothing is left to the imagination, as we are literally taken inside this hellhole, an example of immersive cinema, with the film designed to plunge viewers into the psychological mindset of the times, seeing the profound effects, where if the guards could have their way, this prosecutor would never again see the light of day, TWO PROSECUTORS - New Sergei Loznitsa movie ... YouTube (1:17).   But Stepniak urges Kornev to visit Stalin, or members of the Politburo, and do whatever it takes to get as close to the highest powers of the land with a message of what goes on inside these prison walls, as it’s a crime against the revolution.  Accordingly, Kornev takes a train to Moscow, but on route his attempts at sleep are interrupted by an extended monologue from the wildly eccentric old man named Pegleg (also played by Alexander Filippenko), who tells tales about losing a leg and an arm fighting for the Soviets in the Battle of Kowel in WWI, one of the fiercest battles in history, and how he met with Lenin personally in Smolny for war disability benefits, touting his generosity, now seeking an audience with Stalin.  Inspired by Captain Kopeikin from the biting critique of mass corruption in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, this underlines the disenchantment of the Old Leninist Guard, described as “the true believers,” with the direction of the revolution, where half of the Red Army’s entire officer corps was either killed or imprisoned, filling the screen with an omnipresent dread, as it shows how authoritarian systems actually destroy their own ideals, where Stalinism was the antithesis of Bolshevism, something only the Trotskyites truly understood, making them targets as well.

While the first part of the film is a hellish, Dante’s Inferno allegory, where the gates of Hell bear the inscription, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” the second part exudes a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, shot inside the marble halls of the old Latvian Radio building in Riga, a Soviet relic constructed in the Stalinist Empire style, the only Latvian public service station to broadcast in Russian.  Swallowed inside the massive interior space, where it’s easy to get lost inside a maze of offices and corridors, with a giant, winding staircase reaching upstairs, Kornev seeks a meeting with the Procurator General, the highest-ranking law officer in the entire country, but is turned away by his secretary (Nerijus Gadliauskas), a man who is fastidious about manners and details, as he has no appointment, but Kornev is persistent, refusing to take no for an answer, so he waits and waits, like the brilliant opening sequence in Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL (1962), Orson Welles- The Trial: Before The Law - Prologue | Franz ... YouTube (2:51), until everyone else has been seen, and only then does the secretary allow him entrance.  Sitting in front of a statue of Stalin, where above that bust hangs a portrait of Lenin, the second prosecutor, Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) commands immediate attention and respect, never remotely cracking a smile, calm, yet stern, and acutely intelligent, with a sharp ear for details, never missing a thing, where the two prosecutors are intentionally pitted as mirror images of one another, both tasked with rooting out corruption and investigating state crimes.  Knowingly bypassing the local authorities in Bryansk because he knows they’ve been infiltrated by the NKVD, Kornev acts as an ambassador for Stepniak, recounting the egregious conditions there, revealing how the NKVD have rounded up, arrested, and then tortured or killed all the Old Bolsheviks into confessing purely fictional crimes, then using those confessions to issue death warrants, with Vyshinsky shockingly displaying a sympathetic ear, as if hearing these accusations for the first time, Two Prosecutors new clip official from Cannes Film Festival ...  YouTube (55 seconds), indicating he needs medical evidence of the scars of torture if he is to proceed, instructing Kornev to provide that evidence.  Acknowledging that would be paramount to political suicide, as the NKVD would arrest him for crimes against the state, Vyshinsky offers legal protections, starting with evidence they had this face-to-face meeting, guaranteed train passage, along with official documents authorizing him to conduct further investigations.  Kornev leaves hopefully, fully aware of the grave consequences at stake, finding himself sitting in a compartment shared with two jovial men who describe themselves as factory inspector engineers, Vasily (Valentin Novopolskij) and Petya (Dmitrijus Denisiukas), where they toast to Soviet law, with Vasily gleefully singing Shostakovich’s the counterplan song on guitar, which repeats itself over the end credits performed by a full choir, "The Song of the Counter-Plan" [Песня о Встречном] - Soviet ... YouTube (2:45), as it was seen and heard in the 1932 film COUNTERPLAN by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler.  Whatever inklings viewers may have had up to this point, Kornev becomes the Josef K. of his own story, as the chilling final shot is nothing less than shocking, revealing the true scope of Stalin’s Great Purge, which literally engulfs the entire country in a shroud of death.  Clearly as much about Putin’s Russia as Stalin’s, it should be noted that all three of these Russian actors, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, and Anatoli Beliy, left Russia after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, where their performances offer a testimony of political resistance.  Impeccably shot by Oleg Mutu, typically associated with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and his Palme d’Or winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) (2007), but also Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) (2012), so detailed and precise, with no camera movement whatsoever, only static shots that intensify the creeping paranoia and full-blown claustrophobia, a world where colors are almost non-existent, this is a full-blown horror story that we’re not likely to forget.   

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto)

 

Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho

Mendonça at Cannes

Mendonça with Wagner Moura

Mendonça on the set with Eugenia Alexandrova

cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova

THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto)             B                                                           Brazil  France  Netherlands  Germany  (161 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief.

Winner of Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes, while also awarded the FIPRESCI Prize, listed at #3 from the Film Comment Poll: Best Films of 2025 and #4 from the Cahiers du Cinéma: Top 10 Films of 2025, the film is an elegiac portrait of Brazil in the late 1970’s, set at the tail end of a fascist dictatorship when political violence and corruption were rampant, a time fueled by murder and misinformation, which seems to mirror what’s happening in America at the moment, as we’re seeing this same recipe for authoritarianism being played out on a daily basis, with a President and his Party setting the groundwork for fascism by routinely dismantling the fundamental cornerstones of freedom, like freedom of speech, the press, academia, public education, research and development, and the arts, and then replacing them with a politics of silence, where one shudders to think about what’s happening out of sight behind the scenes.  Thoroughly manipulating the press and social media content, literally reviving a culture of racism, while systematically terrorizing black and brown neighborhoods, the President currently utilizes a para-military ICE goon squad, like something right out of Costa-Gavras Z (1969), as his own private army operating with impunity, answerable to no authority, with no government oversight, claiming they are rounding up immigrants, arresting and removing the worst of the worst when, in reality, 95% have no felony convictions, unlike the President, who is a convicted felon, guilty on 34 counts of fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal hush money paid to a porn star to buy her silence on his first run to the Presidency in 2016.  Much like a dictatorship, which is all about dirty secrets and concealment, that pretty much describes this Presidency, as from day one the immediate attempt was to destroy the structure of government and eliminate all watchdog organizations, while at the same time firing all the scientists, doctors, economists, and the PhD’s while replacing them with party hacks and loyalists, people who aren’t remotely qualified to serve in these positions, whose only purpose is to rubber stamp the President’s agenda.  The highly publicized, racially motivated immigration dragnet, largely in cities controlled by the opposition party, demonstrates a blatant disregard of the law both at work and in the courts, having a devastating affect across the country, as nothing stops this administration from continually regurgitating fabricated lies round the clock to the American people about what they’re doing, preaching that they’re making neighborhoods safe while routinely pepper spraying, attacking, and arresting U.S. citizens, journalists, and even Congressional representatives from the opposing party who question their actions and try to expose what they’re actually doing, as they’re continually seen slamming parents to the ground in front of their children, even pregnant mothers, before separating them from those same children, and then allowing them to die in record numbers (even greater than the Covid years) while incarcerated in abysmally overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, intentionally denying access to medical care which could prevent nearly all the fatalities (Trump Administration Deadlier for ICE Detainees Than ...). 

Every year films with a popular political slant tend to get overpraised, which is not to say they’re not good films, but it’s questionable whether they rise to the level of greatness.  This year those films tend to be dissident  Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadef sadeh) (2025) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s portrait of Iranian political repression in The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Dâne-ye anjîr-e ma'âbed) (2024), as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s alarmist yet Academy-pleasing One Battle After Another (2025).  To those we can add this film, a classically structured tension film that jumps back and forth in time, concerning the inheritance of fear, the price of resistance, and the need to unlearn the forgetting.  Formerly a journalist and film critic before he began to focus on his career as a filmmaker in the 1990’s, Mendonça is the maker of Aquarius (2016), a film about a woman who refuses to sell her beachfront apartment to a developer, who wants to tear it down and build a skyscraper, so they try to force her out through increasingly abusive and violent means, and BACURAI (2019), a surreal Western about a corrupt and murderous scheme to secure water rights, both featuring the incomparable Brazilian actress Sônia Braga, while the documentary PICTURES OF GHOSTS (2023) analyzes how the city of Recife, the filmmaker’s home town, was once a cinema hub, and how the loss of its movie houses has reflected the city’s broader transformations over time.  This largely subversive work is a more vividly detailed extension of that film, where the filmmaker expresses his belief, “Fiction films are the best documentaries.”  The title is deliberately misleading and ironic, as the film isn’t about a classic John le Carré spy but a political refugee hiding in Brazil's 1977 dictatorship, alluding to his undercover life, the “secret” operations of the regime, and the elusive nature of truth and memory under oppression, with the “agent” representing anyone navigating hidden truths.  Fueled by Brazilian movies from the 70’s, like Bruno Barreto’s Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976), where a poster can be seen outside the movie theater, also Carlos Diegues’ XICA (1976) and Bye Bye Brazil (Bye Bye Brasil) (1979), they were actually made during the military dictatorship, yet coming at a time when a new political openness began, a certain liberalization of the regime.  Peppered with references to genre films, B-movies, 1970’s hits, and the very environment of movie theaters, the protagonist's father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is a projectionist at Cine São Luiz, the movie house of Recife, evoking a real character from PICTURES OF GHOSTS, though here it functions as a center of resistance.  Shot on vintage camera equipment in Panavision ‘Scope by Russian-born, Paris-based cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova, this film partially came about by the seven-year research of documents and archives for his film PICTURES OF GHOSTS, using that process to advance the storyline for this film, featuring a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles, all living in the shadows, like ghosts of their own existence, as they are targets for elimination, their lives erased by the state, revealing a legacy of chaos, havoc, and the horrible stain political violence leaves in a nation’s memory.  Never really knowing the type of danger he is in, only that he is being chased, what happens to the protagonist is left offscreen, only revealed secondhand near the end through a newspaper clipping.

After the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which authoritarian rhetoric and political repression became acceptable again, it recalls The Captive Mind (1953) by Czesław Miłosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, a blueprint for understanding totalitarianism, as it reveals the psychological toll from living under an authoritarian regime, transforming minds from within, literally losing one’s ability to think freely, making this film read like a silent commentary on the present.  There’s also an indirect message on the decolonization of Angola, the second-largest Portuguese-speaking country after Brazil.  A movie like this makes you appreciate the wonders of a working democracy, with a safeguard of protected freedoms built into the Constitution, allowing dissent as part of any healthy discussion, as democracy works best when diverse interests and multiple points of view are represented.  When those protections are stripped away, the effect is immediate, as there’s a corrupt lawlessness that exists at every level of government bureaucracies, where protecting their own interests is all that matters, irrespective of any harm done to the populace.  This film is like a road map into those troubling times, where the Brazilian military dictatorship lasted from 1964 to 1985 (Military dictatorship in Brazil: a history of violence), marked by state-sanctioned repression, censorship, and an artificial economic transformation, this 21-year authoritarian regime began with a U.S. CIA-backed military coup as a defense against erroneously perceived communist threats.  The regime swiftly granted unchecked power to dissolve political parties, censor the media, and arrest dissenters as they suspended habeas corpus, shut down Congress, and legalized torture.  Following a lead character, Armando (Brazilian actor Wagner Moura in his first Portuguese-language role in years), though most of the film we know him under his alias Marcelo, we watch him as he drifts through various layers of unleashed terror, recalling Kafka’s everyman character of Josef K in The Trial, who is arrested without reason for an unspecified crime, left in a no man’s land of suspicion and distrust, where the prevailing mood of absurdity is everywhere, as no one seems willing to actually identify what crime he may have committed, obscured by a vast, secretive, and inaccessible legal system, but the full weight of the law is thrown at him, suggesting he must be guilty.  At some point in time, plagued by guilt, Josef K begins to believe it himself.  Armando navigates his way through a similar labyrinthian network of bureaucratic traps, returning to his hometown of Recife during the 1977 Brazilian Carnival, described as “a time of mischief,” with nearly 100 deaths reported during the weeklong festivities, as in this chaos he hopes to reconnect with his five-year old son, Fernando, and escape the whirlwind of accusations.  Stephen Spielberg’s JAWS (1975) was in the theaters at the time, where just the poster alone scared the living daylights out of Fernando, nonetheless, he couldn’t wait to see it.  Entrusting his young son with his in-laws, he goes into hiding with a community of dissidents the government would like to make disappear, only to discover Recife is not the safe place he presumed it would be, suddenly finding himself fending for his life, where standouts include Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana, the elderly landlady harboring them, and Robério Diógenes as Euclides, a brutal police officer.  The narrative seems meandering and circuitous, with many forks in the road, making it almost impossible to ascertain just what’s relevant and what isn’t, which is like sifting through the strands of history trying to uncover what ultimately matters.  

The uncomfortable dialogue with the past and the present recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) in how it recreates a city at a particular moment in history, where the present remains haunted by memories, as the movie itself represents an act of resistance, accentuating the importance of the role media plays in standing up to authoritarianism, while it’s also notable for being the last appearance of German actor Udo Kier, who died recently just before Thanksgiving, playing a Jewish Holocaust survivor who is ridiculed by Euclides insisting that he must be a Nazi fugitive.  Told in three chapter headings, it has a novelesque sweep about it, meandering through an obstacle course of diverging storylines, occasionally getting sidetracked with what seems like dead ends, much of it feeling uneven, with sequences that go nowhere, yet at heart this is about the banalization of violence.  At more than two and one-half hours, it proceeds at a leisurely pace, slowly introducing a multitude of characters, becoming an ode to the Brazilian cinema of the filmmaker’s youth, never feeling rushed, and never in a hurry to fill in the missing pieces of a backstory, which only fuels the mounting tension, even managing to blend fantasy and black humor into this visually subversive political thriller, where bright, saturated colors act as a counterpoint to the dark, terrifying subject matter.  Several times we see the portrait of dictator General Ernesto Geisel, which hangs in the offices of the official bureaucratic authorities, yet outside of those photos, there is no talk directly of the dictatorship.  Instead there is an atmosphere of tension and authoritarianism that is established in the initial sequence, where a corpse is laying on the ground at a gas station, an apparent homage to Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), supposedly an anonymous man who tried to rob the establishment days earlier, but no one claims it, while also completely ignored by authorities, indicative of summary executions and the indifference of police power, making it clear that fear contaminates everything, and that this is a regime that weaponizes fear.  By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the viewer, the filmmaker dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end, but at best, it remains ambiguous, hidden under a plethora of clues that spill out, making it increasingly clear that Armando is the subject of foul play, as behind-the-scenes fascist interests have targeted him for execution.  Only in a flashback sequence do we understand that Armando was an engineer and college research academic with his wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), living comfortably in a university setting, when his research is abruptly stolen and the patent rights taken over by the ruthless actions of private industry, which sees dollar signs in profits, making them both expendable, which is made clear in no uncertain terms, eventually targeting his outspoken wife, who dies under mysterious circumstances that may never be known (telling his son she died of pneumonia), making him next.  The entire film plays out on his increasingly paranoid wavelength, acutely aware of his frame of mind, where the beauty of the film is that it deals with surfaces that can be seen, while hiding the real motivations lurking underneath, where corrupt cops, paid informants, and notorious hitmen are on the trail, with what’s seen and unseen on a collision course with destiny, accentuated by newspaper reports that are infuriatingly inaccurate, printing misleading information fed by authorities, anything to take the heat away from the real murderous culprits.

Outside of Héctor Babenco’s THE KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (1985), Brazil has been late in dealing with this ugly part of their history.  Apparently part of the population is still unaware of or has fallen under a collective spell of Bolsonaro-induced societal amnesia from this period of Brazilian history, where this film works as an antidotal corrective.  Argentina, on the other hand, became renown for writing intelligent scripts exploring their dark past in the Dirty War (1976-1983), making films like THE OFFICIAL STORY (1985), THE MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO (1985), NIGHT OF THE PENCILS (1986), and CHRONICLE OF AN ESCAPE (2006), a time when 30,000 leftist sympathizers disappeared, taken to clandestine detention centers where they were tortured and killed before being dumped out of airplanes, dead or alive, over the Atlantic Ocean.  Expressing a fascination with the Brazilian cultural identity, this is a dense and ambitious work, written by Mendonça, which is not so much about the story itself, but creating an atmospheric environment of surveillance and paranoia, addressing the years of the Brazilian dictatorship with a personal, fragmented gaze, populated by a mosaic of interesting secondary figures, including friends, collaborators, former guerrillas, degraded soldiers, and corrupt bureaucrats.  There is no doubt that this is entertaining, filled with an underlying level of tension and suspense that drives the action, coming right after Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles won an Oscar for the Best International Feature with I’M STILL HERE (2024), the highest grossing Brazilian film since the pandemic, which dealt with the arrest and forced disappearance of a woman’s husband during this same military dictatorship, but this film goes off on a bunch of unnecessary tangents that seemingly go nowhere, perhaps adding to the speculation about how difficult it is to read between the lines of history, where much of the planted archival material is misinformation, making it hard to ascertain what really happened.  Imperceptively jumping ahead to the present, there’s a lengthy sequence near the end of modern day university student researchers scouring the secretly recorded material of the times in search of unraveling the truth, including Flávia (Laura Lufési) who fixates on Marcelo’s audio tapes, as the story advances, halts, gets sidetracked, and discovers new revelations much as she unearths these new details, but it’s unclear who they are working for, what their aims may be, and who is funding their research.  There are a lot of assumptions in this film, with nothing ever spelled out, leaving giant gaps in the story, where it’s easy to speculate and come up with our own theories, but the emphasis is not on exactly what happened, rather why it was covered up, and what this means in our current political landscape where authorities are doing exactly the same thing, using the highest echelons of power to obscure the truth, erase history, while feeding incessant lies to the media, making it almost impossible to ever know what is really going on.  This lack of transparency is at the heart of every authoritarian government, using all available technological advantages to obstruct the truth, making a science of cover-ups and obfuscation, continually misleading the public until all that’s left are the layer of lies which are meant to protect the powerful forces behind the scenes, most of whom we will never really know, or just what crimes they got away with.  Never really delving under the surface at the root cause of any of this, Mendonça’s film unearths the blueprint for how it gets done, revealing the extent of the infiltration in every branch of governmental authority, and the murderous lengths they are willing to go to protect the private financial interests of wealthy Brazilian business elites, as they are literally stealing massive funds from an unsuspecting public that hasn’t the means to protect themselves from this kind of insidious criminal operation under the guise of government, leaving behind a legacy of trauma and inequality that persists today.

Note

“I'm calling from the future. Fascism is still around.”  An Internet meme on X by Carlos Aguilar