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DILLON ON FILM

Brazil: 40 Years On

Four decades on, Terry Gilliam’s dystopian masterpiece continues to impress

Simon Dillon
Fanfare
Published in
6 min readFeb 18, 2025

Credit: 20th Century Fox/Universal

I didn’t see Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire Brazil (1985) in the cinema, but discovered it later, one night on a BBC2 screening in my early teens. A few people had told me they hated it, but I had the opposite reaction. The film blew my adolescent mind. It was vivid, bold, and bracingly bizarre. I wasn’t quite sure what it was about, nor did I understand all the reference points as I’d yet to read Nineteen Eighty-Four (or A Clockwork Orange — another key inspiration), but I loved the sublime strangeness of Gilliam’s lunatic fascist bureaucracy (hilariously set twenty minutes into the future). I also felt a curious affinity with the protagonist, Ministry of Information employee Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce).

Although he’s from a wealthy background with a well-connected, plastic surgery-obsessed mother (Katherine Helmond), Sam initially refuses to take advantage of his social status. Instead, he plods along in his dull profession as a low-ranking official assisting his perpetually stressed boss, Mr Kurtzman (Ian Holm), who seems one bureaucratic error away from a nervous breakdown. Said absurd error occurs when a swatted fly lands in a typewriter, causing confusion between surnames on a file (Buttle and Tuttle)…

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Written by Simon Dillon

Novelist and Short Story-ist. Film and Book Lover. If you cut me, I bleed celluloid and paper pulp. Blog: www.simondillonbooks.wordpress.com

Responses (31)

In fact, on a visual level, Brazil represents peak Gilliam, with his trademark wide-angle lenses showing off Norman Garwood’s remarkable sets to superb effect.