Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff with accounts of her own family's complex political and industrial past, filmmaker Petra Costa witnesses their rise and fall and the tragically polarized nation that remains.

Although the film focuses on events in the South American country, it reflects a global phenomenon of polarization, political violence, naturalization of hate speech, and the rise of fascism to power.

[20] The Oscar nomination had great repercussions in the Brazilian press, which highlighted the fact that the political polarization of this country had reached the ceremony of the most important award in the U.S. film industry.

[24] Political polarization is one of the central themes of the film, which is symbolically represented in a scene that shows a wall that was put up by the police on the Esplanade of Ministries in Brasilia to divide the demonstrators in favor and against the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, who were positioned, literally, left and right of it.

[25] On one side, it was a legal and legitimate process to remove from office a president who had lost popular support; on the other, what happened was a parliamentary coup d'état led by a corrupt congressman and a traitorous vice-president.

In the film, Costa does not hide her stance – regarding the wall and the narrative of the facts - and this radical sincerity, in the opinion of A. O. Scott in his critique published by The New York Times, "enhances rather than undermines the credibility of her report".

Each of these facts is told in a dialectic relationship with the most personal testimony of Petra Costa, who also tells the story of her own family as a mirror of Brazilian political polarization: her grandfather a contractor who did business with the state during civil and military governments; a part of her relatives who celebrated the 1964 coup and, decades later, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff; her parents’ left-wing activism, who were persecuted by the dictatorship, her mother a sympathizer of the Workers Party.

The website's critics consensus reads: "Assembled with absorbing insight and passion by director Petra Costa, The Edge of Democracy is a disturbing and expansive overview of how a democratic nation can teeter into autocracy.

The feeling her film imparts will be familiar to anyone who has experienced the politics of the past few years as a series of shocks and reversals that call into question basic assumptions about the shape of reality.

"[36] Leslie Felperin of The Guardian gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, saying, "Costa manages to craft an intimate primer about the state's descent into populism and the fraying of the country's democratic fabric."

She also pointed out that "Costa’s voiceover adds shape but doesn’t intrude excessively and lets the powerful compilation of original and archive footage, material shot on the ground in the middle of riots and by drones soaring hundreds of feet above Brasilia, tell the story.

That continual contrast between up close and in the fight and soaring high above is mirrored throughout by the film-maker’s perspective, always simultaneously part of the story and watching from a distance" [37] Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker praised the documentary and said it has "enrthilling in which Costa juxtaposes historic public events with remarkable private moments.

To hear her English-language voice-over is the equivalent of sitting next to the most fascinating person at a dinner party, someone able to knowledgeably fill you in on things you had little or no idea existed" [39] Variety's Guy Lodge referred to the film as transfixing documentary essay on her country's far-right takeover, painstakingly maps the chain of events that brought the previous government to its knees" and stressed that "Those familiar with Costa’s previous work, including the intimate, unorthodox works Elena and Olmo and the Seagull, will be unsurprised to find a poetic interior dimension to this current-affairs snapshot.".

In his critique, Hunter evaluated that "Costa’s use of news footage, tapes of incriminating conversations that were made public and acts of self-serving betrayal gives The Edge Of Democracy the feel of an All The President’s Men-style political thriller.

Club gave a mixed review praises the coverage of the themes, but criticizes what he saw as the documentary's lack of comprehensiveness: "Costa understandably places emphasis on the unjust political machinations of Brazil’s Lower House, but also glosses over the failures of Rousseff’s government and its incontrovertible manipulation of the federal budget.

[48] Jerônimo Teixera of the Brazilian magazine Crusoé published a negative review of the movie stating that it: "twist the reality to say that democracy is at risk in Brazil [which] can deceive Hollywood, but it is only the narcissistic outburst of a non-conformed girl.".

In another screening, at Neuehouse Hollywood, in Los Angeles, Jane Campion said that the scenes in the film are like "love letters to Brazil, to the Brazilian people" and that it talks about "the explosion of the political system".

[51] After the Oscar nomination, Caetano Veloso published in his social networks a video in English in which he talks about the situation of Brazil in the Bolsonaro government: "I never thought that in my life I would see so much regression.

[54] Paulo Coelho congratulated the director on her Oscar nomination, said he was arrested and tortured in the military dictatorship, and still has "scars" on his soul, and said that Brazil has seen the return of dark clouds since President Bolsonaro took office.

[56] After the criticism he received for the alleged offensive and macho tone of this comment, including by Dilma Rousseff herself, he wrote an article for O Globo asking for "peace" [57] and the episode had repercussions in the Brazilian media.

[58][59][60][61][62][63] The documentary also stimulated much debate within the Brazilian society, with director Petra Costa's social media accounts becoming a place of intense political debate and growing interest from her followers (198.7k on Twitter;[64] 349k on Instagram;[65] and 86k likes on Facebook[66]) Costa has been invited to share her political views in editorials for The Guardian and New York Times,[67][68] in which she wrote about President Bolsonaro's war against the truth and the erosion of Brazilian democracy, mirroring similar processes elsewhere in the world, especially the United States.