01
The Trial
Why this pick
A nightmarish bureaucratic maze rendered with monumental, distorted spaces; it shares Brazil’s helplessly comic dread and an individual’s futile search for sense inside an impersonal system.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1985 2h 12m GBR
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Brazil
ComedyScience Fiction
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Brazil, try these.
01
02
PlayTime
Why this pick
Its immaculate modernist city turns everyday administration and technology into visual absurdity, matching Brazil’s affection for overwhelming design, deadpan comedy, and tiny human rebellions.
03
The Lobster
Why this pick
Its rigid social rules and calmly absurd official logic create a similarly funny, cruel dystopia, where romance becomes an act of resistance against a system that speaks in nonsense.
04
Sorry to Bother You
Why this pick
A sharp anti-corporate satire that keeps escalating into surreal, visually audacious absurdity, preserving Brazil’s rage at dehumanising systems and its gleeful refusal to behave realistically.
05
The Zero Theorem
Why this pick
Gilliam revisits the fluorescent clutter, corporate control, and tragicomic alienation of Brazil in a more intimate, digitally saturated fable about a lonely worker seeking meaning.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
In a dystopian, hyper-bureaucratic future, Sam Lowry is a low-level government employee who frequently daydreams of himself as a winged warrior saving a damsel in distress. A fly gets jammed in a printer and creates a typographical error, resulting in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle, instead of renegade air conditioning specialist and suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle. Sam is assigned the task of rectifying the error. Visiting Buttle's widow, Sam encounters their neighbour Jill Layton, and is astonished to discover that she resembles the woman from his recurring dreams. Jill has been trying to help Mrs Buttle establish what happened to her husband, but her efforts have been obstructed by bureaucracy. Unknown to her, she is now considered a terrorist accomplice of Tuttle for attempting to report the mistake of Buttle's arrest. Sam approaches Jill, but she avoids giving him full details, worried the government will track her down.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Jonathan Pryce
Sam Lowry
Ian Holm
Mr. M. Kurtzmann
Kim Greist
Jill Layton
Robert De Niro
Archibald 'Harry' Tuttle
Katherine Helmond
Mrs. Ida Lowry
Bob Hoskins
Spoor
Michael Palin
Jack Lint
Peter Vaughan
Mr. Helpmann