A severely schematic crime thriller that paints a rather stereotypical picture of the Brazilian underworld but is chiefly about how many long, unbroken, and overhead shots it can pull off within an almost two-hour runtime, Pedro Morelli’s State of Fear is a spinoff of Brotherhood, the crime drama series the director created for Netflix, where it ran for two seasons. Given the nature of the movie, one might expect a work akin to the ultra-violent City of God, but the result is a far cry from the staying power of Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s 2002 hellish epic, which, in turn, received its own television sequel City of God: The Fight Rages On, available on HBO Max since 2024. Starring Naruna Costa, who reprises her role in the series, as a lawyer turned co-leader of a criminal faction called the Brotherhood, and Camilla Damião as the mercurial niece who thinks she knows better, State of Fear is the sort of movie that has many targets but has no idea which one to aim for first. Surely, it can be taken as a statement about institutional corruption and neglect and how the disenfranchised resort to violent means to address the injustice it sows, but even that feels rather broad and facile. If anything, Morelli sidelines that critique of systemic culpability to service a kidnap-for-ransom angle, which makes up the bulk of the movie but never really amounts to something compelling or revelatory.
At the same time, State of Fear is hardly convincing as a character piece, precisely because the director is less interested in making the viewer deeply connect with any of the characters than he is in triggering the gunfire. As the bullets go flying from the outset, the movie only ever ricochets off its thin plot. To that end, the story picks up a decade after the demise of Edson Savage (Seu Jorge, playing the same part he did in the series), the estranged brother of Costa’s Cristina Ferreira, who led the Brotherhood. Cristina looks after his orphaned daughter, Damião’s Elisa, who advocates nonviolence and seeks community through the art of rapping but cannot seem to escape her criminal past. A heated argument with her aunt sends Elisa and her boyfriend running away and into crooked cops, including David Santos’ Borges, who later hold her hostage for money. Incarcerated members of the Brotherhood, meanwhile, are set to be transferred to another detention center with maximum security. As Cristina negotiates to block the fatal transfer while trying to rescue her niece, the Brotherhood declares a Salve Geral, a coordinated public attack against state forces, soon turning São Paulo into a civil war zone, with news reports and mass hysteria dominating the soundscape. “The city that never sleeps is now living a waking nightmare,” as one reporter aptly notes.
In a rare moment of emotional heft, the movie finds Marcélia Cartaxo’s character visibly lost in the city-wide chaos, scurrying to get home and surviving civilian killings, only to deal with more trouble involving her son Borges, now in a tight spot after his fellow abductor gets killed in the riots. Cartaxo delivers the most grounded performance in the film, no matter the shortcomings of Morelli and Julia Furrer’s script. The hunt that follows, however,from the hostage house to the suspended train station, is standard action movie gesture and so heavily telegraphed that the story runs out of steam, if any existed to begin with. One can practically predict how things will pan out because the film’s textual scaffolding points toward a dead end, featuring a coda that is symbolic at best. Some images, too, provide nothing beyond ambient paranoia. Elsewhere, in its many narrative swerves, uninspired aesthetic (save perhaps for the flashback sequence between young Elisa and her father, undeniably the film’s best bit), and music that only seems to double down on the shallow proceedings, things are decidedly tipped into trope-reliant television territory. Not only does State of Fear feel episodic, but even more so it lands like a digestible cut of a series-ending season than something meant for the big screen. There’s a lot of action here, but there’s no real thrill; a lot of buildup, only to snuff it out altogether and arrive at a generic commentary. For hardcore fans of the genre, State of Fear is basically a gold mine — that is, if you ignore everything that happens.
DIRECTOR: Pedro Morelli; CAST: Naruna Costa, Camilla Damião, Seu Jorge, David Santos, Marcélia Cartaxo; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: February 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
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