“What have you done with his body?” the bereft widow demands of a man from the government, asking after her husband was hauled away because of a bureaucratic error and died in custody. “He hadn’t done anything! He was good! What have you done with his body!”

“Not my department, of course,” he replies, haplessly. “I’m only Records.”

That’s a linchpin scene from Terry Gilliam’s visionary 1985 masterpiece “Brazil,” a prophetic and bleakly satirical depiction of a society entombed in fascism. What’s amazing about “Brazil,” even after 40 years, is how prophetic it was about the manipulation of public mores and knowledge by a totalitarian regime.

Much of this owes its coloration to George Orwell — indeed, among Gilliam’s early ideas for his project’s title was “1984 1/2” — and some to Tom Sto

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