15 Most Disturbing Sci-Fi Movies

It’s the uncaring and broken bureaucracy that makes Brazil so resonant to contemporary viewers. A bleak vision at the time, the absurdist scenery aside we’re edging ever closer to a world driven by non-sensical bureaucrats, who evangelize whatever or whoever the authority du-jour is.

Brazil is the second of Terry Gillam’s nightmares on celluloid to grace this list. The man knows how to give depth to a dystopia. Undoubtedly inspired by Orwell’s 1984, Brazil is set in a world of passionless grey and broken gadgets where everyone is kept distracted with mundane busy work and plastic surgery.

At its core Brazil is a surrealist satire. But the comedy of it makes its darker elements even more distressing. Friends torture friends, the status-quo goes questioned, mothers have plastic surgery to look like lovers and dreams are crushed. All while the unmitigated inertia of the state triumphs over all hope. Brazil is funny and while it pokes fun at the ludicrousness of systemic authoritarian bureaucracy, it’s also bleak.

The baddies never win so thoroughly as they do in Brazil. Making a comedy of such sheer hopelessness is a singularly British trait. Brazil shows us a terrifying world where the only small victory for our protagonist is the blissful release of a lobotomy.