Stream It Or Skip It: ‘State of Fear’ on Netflix, a Ripping Action Movie Spinoff of Brazilian Crime-Saga Series ‘Brotherhood’

By John Serba

State of Fear (now on Netflix) is as intense an action film as you’re likely to see all year. Pedro Morelli directs, spinning off/continuing the Sao Paolo-set series he created, Brotherhood, which debuted on Netflix in 2019 and wrapped in 2022 with a second season. He brings back his lead, Naruna Costa, as Cristina Ferreira, the straight-laced lawyer who found herself caught between the corrupt police force and the Brotherhood, the powerful criminal gang led by her brother Edson, again played by Seu Jorge (in flashbacks, since the character died at the series’ conclusion). The film wraps up some character arcs and introduces new ones – for another film or series maybe? – but that all feels secondary to the immediacy of Morelli’s virtuoso action sequences. 

STATE OF FEAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Should we feel sympathetic for the Sao Paolo civil police when the Brotherhood wages all-out war against them, sudden and unannounced, with bombs and a nigh-endless hail of bullets? Brotherhood showed us how nasty and corrupt they are, but the attackers are just as committed to brutality as they are. Of course, the answer is far from cut-and-dried: We’re inside a police station when the assault begins – smack in the middle of a baby shower for the wife of a cop. Explosions erupt, glass shatters, fireballs burst, bullets tear through flesh. Of course she goes into labor and they rush through various scenes of outright pandemonium and get in a car, a cop car, the same cop cars that are being targeted by Brotherhood members with M-16s on motorcycles, and they tear out of the station as she screams in pain in the backseat and at one point she points a pistol out the window to take out pursuers and they finally find a safe place to pull over so she can give bloody painful birth and after nearly 10 minutes, the long unbroken shot finally ends with an edit: the title card.

Hold onto that feeling of (temporary) relief. Contextual exposition in the previous scene reveals that 10 years have passed since Edson (Jorge, perhaps best known to American viewers from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) died. Not only has the Brotherhood launched civil warfare, but they’re also behind dozens of organized, concurrent prison riots. Jump to TWO DAYS EARLIER. Cristina has officially picked a side. She’s now The Counselor, working the officially-not-criminal-but-actually-criminal system for the unapologetically-criminal org, which frames its actions as “justice.” Moral gray areas – can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, right? She even participates in conjugal visits with the Brotherhood’s current leader, Ivan (Lee Taylor). Then she goes home to her swank manse, where raises her rebellious teenage niece Elisa (Camilla Damiao), Edson’s orphaned daughter. Elisa is rebellious in the sense that she opposes violence in a city that’s defined by it. Perhaps it’s no surprise that she and Cristina routinely butt heads.

Elisa throws her boyfriend on the back of her motorcycle and tears ass through the city until two cops, Anselmo (Enio Cavalcante) and Borges (David Santos), pull them over. Of course, they’re assholes who threaten the kids for bribes. She thinks namedropping her pops would help her, but they see dollar signs and kidnap her, holding her for ransom. An apoplectic Cristina goes to the Brotherhood for help but they’re all up in arms because their imprisoned leaders are being rounded up and transferred to a maximum security prison, so they coordinate riots and, eventually, straight-up kill-any-cop-you-see attacks. The latter erupt just as Cristina tries to pay the ransom, mucking up the exchange. Borges tosses Elisa into a car and takes off, prompting Cristina to hunt him down, which is easier said than done, especially when the city is a locked-down traffic-jam extremely violent war zone. But no one told Cristina it can’t be done.

Photo: Netflix

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Can’t help but think of Fernando Mereilles’ favela saga City of God (trivia: Morelli worked with Mereilles previously, co-directing the making-of documentary for Blindness) crossed with Romain Gavras’ operatic virtuoso action epic Athena.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s relatively brief and relegated to a flashback, but Jorge shows a complex cocktail of emotions in a moving, revealing sequence between Edson and the young Elisa (Yetunde Hammed).

Sex And Skin: None.

Photo: Netflix

Our Take: State of Fear pulls no punches. Not a single one. Morelli and co-scripter Julia Furrer adopt a near-operatic dramatic arc from classical Greek tragedy, with highly symbolic narrative bookends, including a hearty gut punch of an ending (that doesn’t feel too far removed from Mereilles’ sensibilities). The film trafficks in grandiose gestures, depicting birth as an act of violence, and death, even more so. The film lands some heavy blows, with a thematically broad narrative populated with characters of middling depth – they sometimes feel more representational of ideas than fleshed-out human beings – functioning within moral gray areas that spread like smoke from an unextinguishable flame.

Morelli walks a tightrope, essentially depicting extreme violence as a means of condemning it. There’s no glorification here – violence is uniformly ugly and ruthless, and if it doesn’t destroy lives, it destroys souls. He complicates the idea by presenting Elisa as an idealist who preaches nonviolence, then putting her in situations that force her hand. Contrast that with the use of Borges’ mother (Marcelia Cartaxo) to complicate the morality of a corrupt cop, a loathsome cretin who’s also a mama’s boy, lonesome and pathetic, a sad child of a man. Again, this is a world with no absolutes. 

But such fraught dynamics aren’t the primary draw of State of Fear. Morelli couches all this sweaty moral fretting within the framework of a pedal-to-the-metal action movie. Several tense, meticulously engineered set pieces show off the director’s affection for long, unbroken, heavily choreographed shots that fully exploit contextual surroundings – the opening assault on the police station, a shadowy nighttime foot chase and shootout in a sprawling train station, Cristina peering through doors and windows of a residence searching for her kidnapped niece. Morelli effectively develops and sustains tension, amplifying it with sound design and patient camerawork. 

State of Fear neatly establishes the macro-context and sharply executes the microdramas within it. Sometimes, the former feels undernourished, like it needs another movie (one could theorize the film was conceptualized as a third season of Brotherhood, and was condensed down to 103 minutes). But for a mere “spinoff” of a TV series, this is a surprising and thematically sturdy film rendered emotionally immediate and propulsive through brilliant, sometimes highly technical, visually driven storytelling.

Our Call: State of Fear is trending toward being a deeply underappreciated action film. So appreciate it, dammit! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.