The Year’s Most Urgent Best Picture Contender Is the One Almost No One Has Seen

If you came into I'm Still Here a few seconds late, or simply looked away from the screen during the title that identifies the time and place of its opening scenes, you'd have no idea you were looking at life under a military dictatorship. Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) floats in the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, 1970, while her children play on the beach nearby, hatching a scheme to sneak a stray dog into the house under the nose of their father, Rubens (Selton Mello). It's been six years since the army seized power, and yet life, at least at a glance, seems indistinguishable from the way it might have been beforehand. Everything is just so … normal.

The Paiva family's life doesn't stay that way for long. One day, armed men show up at the house and take Rubens in for questioning, although they decline to say who they work for or what questions he's meant to answer. And after that, nothing is the same. Brazilian audiences, who made director Walter Salles' movie the most popular domestic release since the pandemic, might well have known what was coming next. I'm Still Here was adapted, by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, from the 2015 memoir by Rubens' son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and Rubens himself was a prominent figure, an elected official before the coup, and an international face of the disappeared after he was taken into custody. But the movie doesn't view its story through the long lens of history, or even the eyes of its source's author. (Marcelo is such an incidental character, in fact, that it's a surprise to learn that the entire project stems from him.) Instead, it's focused on Eunice, who, with a husband in prison and five children ranging from elementary school to college age, has to decide each day how much to share with them, whether they're better protected being shielded from the worst or preparing for it.

Even during a dictatorship in which tens of thousands were tortured and hundreds murdered by the state, it's possible for the Paivas to live what seems to be an ordinary life. Before Rubens' arrest, he's a paunchy, middle-aged dad who works as a civil engineer and does goofy dances with his daughters; Eunice loves having guests over and basking in compliments about her perfectly cooked soufflé. It's not until the men with guns show up that we learn he was ever involved in politics, let alone a political exile who had to flee the country, and much longer before we get a hint that his activities have been ongoing. Perhaps the couple's tastes are a touch unconventional—one of the thugs looks disapprovingly at the painting of a man's mouth frozen in a gasp of horror on the cover of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King —but they hardly read as radicals. To their kids, they might even seem a little bit dull.

But as the political scientist Thomas Pepinsky wrote on the eve of the first Trump administration, everyday life in a repressive regime can often feel unremarkable . "You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family. There are schools and businesses, and some people 'make it' through hard work and luck. Most people worry about making sure their kids get into good schools." Under " competitive authoritarianism ," as defined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, the mechanisms of democracy remain outwardly intact, even if meaningful change, at least for the better, becomes impossible. In traditional American portrayals, such as the new version of Kiss of the Spider Woman that premiered at Sundance in January, authoritarian rule means boots in the streets and a permanent cloud over the sun; the only thing missing is a sign that reads "Now Entering Dystopia." Even when we imagine it taking root at home, it's as a reflection of our depictions of other countries, usually featuring imagery cribbed from propagandistic depictions of the Soviet bloc or the Axis powers that seems fundamentally incompatible with America's image of itself. So even when we're shown how it could happen here, we're subtly reassured that it won't. (I mean, if people suddenly started throwing up Nazi salutes at political rallies , surely someone would do something, right?)

What I'm Still Here , which was made by people who lived through Brazil's dictatorship, conveys is that it's possible to live a normal life under a repressive regime, especially once you've learned to redefine what "normal" means. For Eunice and Rubens, that's an act of defiance more than a function of naivete. They're sufficiently invested in their country's future to be marking out land for the construction of a new house, even as their friends are fleeing and urging them to follow suit. But the movie doesn't tell us that right away. It doesn't tell us everything is fine—in fact, early on, their eldest daughter, Vera, is roughly questioned by police on the side of the road, and the news of foreign diplomats kidnapped by anti-government radicals pours from their TV set. But even those abductions have become so commonplace that it's hard to keep them straight. When Rubens' middle daughter says she thought the kidnappers had already released their hostage, he responds, "No, that was the German ambassador. This one's Swiss."

Among the 10 Best Picture nominees, there are several with a claim on contemporary relevance, some more tenuous than others. Conclave depicts a centuries-old institution at risk of falling prey to far-right elements. Wicked: Part I describes a kingdom whose ruler whips up a xenophobic panic to cement his hold on power. Nickel Boys brings atrocities committed against Black Americans in the name of criminal justice to light. The Brutalist , which opens with an inverted Statue of Liberty, underlines the country's shaky record of welcoming new arrivals, and Anora illuminates the mad scramble for survival in a culture that values net worth over everything else. But none feel as urgent, as essential as I'm Still Here , or has a performance at its center as elementally powerful as Fernanda Torres'. The actress, who is replaced in the film's final section by her 95-year-old mother, Fernanda Montenegro, doesn't just possess the stoicism needed to endure decades of repression and uncertainty, but an underlying tenderness, a spark sheltered from the storm. That spark helps her survive, but more importantly, she knows she'll need it in the months or years ahead, when—not if—the country is ready to come back to life.

One day, before he's detained, Rubens and Eunice decide to take their family out for ice cream. They sit around a table, and the room hums with life, crowded with people savoring a moment of sweetness. Later, they return without him, trying to recapture that feeling, but the air is heavy with grief. Eunice looks around, and everything seems the same: the same people, making the same carefree chatter. Life goes on, for good or for ill, and people adapt, even when they shouldn't.