Brazil’s Highest-Grossing Film Is Part Of An Unsettling Trilogy

José Padilha is a prominent director in Brazil. As of 2025, Padilha has seven films under his belt, a few of which being documentaries. He has a knack for capturing the life in Brazil and showcasing its realness, warts and all. Documentaries aside, his fictional films are similar thematically. The stories he tends to tell blend fiction with reality as he analyzes the struggles of Brazil with his camera. His approach to cinematic violence is aggressive but not for the sake of entertainment.

It’s no wonder he was chosen to direct the 2014 reboot to Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop. Verhoeven’s film is drenched in hyperviolence with themes surrounding corporate greed and their control over the police force. This is the perfect setup for Padilha to bring this United States blockbuster into the 21st century. Within Padilha’s early work lies a trilogy about police and political corruption influencing urban violence. It all starts with his directorial feature, an Emmy Award-winning documentary titled Bus 174.

Bus 174

His directorial feature is an Emmy Award-winning documentary titled Bus 174. This film depicts a hostage situation where an armed man hijacks a bus. While the film covers the four-hour event up until the brutal ending, it also covers the upbringing of Sandro do Nascimento, the man behind the incident. Through this documentary, Padilha examines Brazil’s “invisible society”. It typically involves street kids living in the slums and how police officers continuously punch down, literally and figuratively, on them. 

Through this backstory, we learn tragic details about Nascimento, including how he watched his single mother stabbed in a robbery. This ultimately leads to him having to live on the streets. Once there, he was lucky enough to survive the Candelária Massacre. This was led by a lynching mob, several of which were police officers, and killed eight unhomed people. Six of the eight victims were children. After describing this unfortunate event, Padilha interviews a social worker who talks about Nascimento’s youth. In it, we learn about his aspirations about wanting to live a quiet life with a job and a home. But, due to his circumstances, he strayed from the path and did what he had to do to survive. 

The Spectrum In Brazil’s Invisible Society

About halfway through the film, Padilha takes the opportunity to explore police negligence and cruelty in Rio de Janeiro. He achieves this by taking the viewers through a hellish experience. He switches to the film’s negatives as he navigates a crowded jail. The prisoners within the cells are pleading for help as they describe their inhumane conditions. There are mentions of contagious diseases overtaking the population. They must take shifts standing and sitting with other prisoners due to the overcrowded situation. This sequence brings their reality and suffering out into the open. Padilha uses this horrifying situation to display how Brazil views and treats this side of invisible society.

This is all shown parallel to the hostage situation. Padilha uses this to explain Nascimento’s anger and possible reasoning for carrying out the hijacking. A question asked within this documentary is what causes misery to turn into violence? Bus 174 does its best to display facts about how the State mistreats the invisible society. This is a playing factor in how it can lead to them becoming violent criminals.

Watching this documentary is the most uncomfortable I’ve been since watching Orozco: The Embalmer. Learning about the living conditions and harsh realities these kids and prisoners experience is heartbreaking, unsettling, and frustrating. The climax, which is unsettling in another way, depicts the police officer’s inadequacies to handle such intense situations. Bus 174 is a look into how brutality and classist ideals can lead to a heavy situation. The film is a starting point for discussions surrounding Brazil’s middle/upper class and how the Rio police force abuses its power against the lower class.

The Elite Squad Films

Padilha continues this thought-provoking type of cinema with Elite Squad and its sequel Elite Squad: The Enemy Within. These two films follow a BOPE officer, Brazil’s tactical police force with questionable actions, Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura). In the first film, he is trying to find a replacement as each blood-filled mission tears a piece from him little by little. In the second film, Nascimento sees how corruption leads towards the politicians. He attempts to put a stop to it, but the corruption and violence go in deeper than he imagined.

Through the character of Nascimento, Padilha gives us a social analysis of Brazil during that time. He examines how political corruption can influence urban violence. We see the chain of events and actions from politicians wanting to secure their jobs through the help of corrupt cops. They start militias within the slums and abuse their power against the population living their daily lives. This leads to violent acts on people not being able to uphold the militia’s demands.

While these are fictional films, Padilha uses his documentary filming techniques to bring a sense of realness to his films. After all, the initial idea for these two films was to explore police and political corruption through a documentary. In the research phase, he figured the best way to handle it would be through a fictional tale inspired by true events. This is where the unsettling nature of the film comes into play.

Violence In Brazilian Films

The majority of the film plays as an action thriller. It displays the unethical actions of BOPE, who as Padilha mentions in an interview “are trained to kill drug dealers in the slums” and the crooked police officers. Because of this, we see tactics used against the drug dealers on how BOPE officers retrieve information. Their torturing methods include actions such as bagging. This is the process of covering someone’s face with a plastic bag to slowly asphyxiate them. These torturing scenes are intense, and due to Padilha’s filming feel so real.

There’s a level of grit that comes with the violence in a lot of Brazilian films. It can be uncomfortable as seen in Bus 174. It can also be cruel such as the Elite Squad films. What makes the violence so unsettling in the latter films is how real, frequent, and normalized it can be in certain areas. This is a reason why Elite Squad: The Enemy Within blew up in Brazil to the point it’s been the highest-grossing title in the country for 15 years.

José Padilha says ideas and emotions are how cinema conveys its language. We see this play out with the recognition and awards these films and Padilha has received. This trilogy struck a chord with a lot of people worldwide. Its universal message of corruption breeding violence transcends into other communities. Padilha does a great job providing the necessary uncomfortable emotions and unsettling details to highlight his thematic question: What causes Brazil to be so violent and can we fix it?

Tags: brazil José Padilha

Categorized:Editorials Horror En Espanol