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IMO, the film is about adherence to policies, procedures, protocol, etc. and the removal of judgment and culpability from society. In it, the sequence of events leading to the protagonist’s torture and death is set in motion by a typographical error. This error should have been easily remedied, but everyone is so bound by procedure that there is no room to correct it. Moreover, the (deeply flawed) protagonist is the only one who recognizes it and has the will to do anything about it. Once the series of events is set in motion, however, it flows to a conclusion like a computer program. Similarly, the protagonist’s attempts to rebel against the system, after initially trying to work through it, are ultimately futile and lead to his destruction. He is, in essence, a bug in the society’s code, and the society is programmed to eliminate him. Our own society is increasingly structured this way. Human judgment frequently leads to horrible outcomes (e.g., racist decisions, misogynistic decisions, graft, just plain bad decisions, etc.); so there’s a good reason for business and government to be structured around objective policies, procedure, protocol, etc. There is, undoubtedly, some danger to it, however, and when you attempt to structure society like a computer program or machine, you run the danger of it malfunctioning in a way the program cannot recognize or correct. Brazil is largely about this, and one of my favorite locations in the film is a shared office with a wall running over a file cabinet. This something obviously wrong, but it’s no one job to do anything about it. Accordingly, not only is it never fixed, no one even remarks upon its absurdity. (I also like the pipes running everywhere. They are like wires in giant machine, and they emphasize the society’s mechanical nature.) Anyone who has ever been frustrated or left feeling helpless by an official or private bureaucracy should be able to relate to the characters in this film, and the inability to navigate a bureaucracy in our society, as in Brazil, can have real and terrible consequences - e.g., loss of income, denial of benefits, denial of medical care, denial of financial assistance, etc. - consequences that could easily be remedied by the exercise of human judgment (or even some flexibility in procedures, policies, protocol, etc.). Moreover, a society so rigidly structured allows everyone in it to avoid culpability...or even thinking critically about their actions. As you may have noted, Brazil has a deeply flawed protagonist, but it doesn’t have a villain. People are sorry for the consequences of their actions, but they’re just following procedures. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I recall the protagonist’s friend apologizing before torturing him to death.) There’s nothing they can do. They’re just cogs in society’s machine or lines of code in its programming and, therefore, as blameless as the rope on a guillotine. The villain, if there is one, is a society largely indifferent to outcomes and unable to recognize or remedy structural or even inadvertent injustice. (Sound familiar?) Think about it when you read stories like:

https://www.propublica.org/article/oreg ... view-board

https://www.propublica.org/article/hud- ... nspections

(It’s not hard to find stories like this, and I picked the first two I found.) The observation in Brazil have really stuck with me, and I found it to be much more prescient than the dystopias depicted in books like 1984, Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451.

I don't think the film's ending was as pessimistic as it needed to be, the main character at least got to lose himself in his dream world as his real life was slipping away. Most of us will not be as fortunate, if even a part, of the film's totalitarian reality came to pass.

But then again, most of us will probably be part of the procedural, bureaucratic torture and murder we helped create, without realizing it.