The Brutalist second look review: Brady Corbet’s handsome, humane American epic

From Tom Hanks’s role in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) to Keanu Reeves’s in The Lake House (2006), ‘architect’ has often been the Hollywood screenwriter’s go-to career for a male romantic lead: a neat mixture of masculine solidity and sensitive artistry, the movie architect dreams things and builds them and gets to stride importantly around construction sites in a sharp suit and hard hat. (Few real world architects, denim-clad, bleary-eyed and hunched over AutoCAD software, will relate.) Brady Corbet’s sprawling, strapping The Brutalist is the second film of 2024 (and, with apologies to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, comfortably the better one) to challenge that archetype with an imposingly engineered metaphor for an America in social, cultural and aesthetic decline – with the architect as tortured visionary, designing a future that few others wish to see.

As a self-conscious chef-d’oeuvre of daunting scale and ambition, it would be convenient to liken The Brutalist to the vast, modernist black hole of a project that consumes its protagonist, mournful Hungarian-Jewish émigré László Toth, as he attempts to make his mark on America’s conservative post-war landscape. But in his third film as director, following the grandiose faux history of The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and the witty, scabrous pop politics of Vox Lux (2018), the 36-year-old Corbet reveals himself as more classicist than brutalist. Told with the linear sweep and literate muscularity of a Great American Novel, and shot in rich, tactile VistaVision, the film recalls nothing so much as the handsome, humane mid-century epics of filmmakers like George Stevens and Otto Preminger – give or take some explicit narrative provocations.

Only The Brutalist ’s supersized running time (215 minutes, not including an elegantly built-in interval) poses a theoretical challenge to mainstream viewing sensibilities. In practice, however, the film feels fleet and nimble, charged with emotional urgency – particularly in its f irst half, which unfolds a familiar immigrant saga in exquisitely anguished detail. We meet Toth (Adrien Brody, returning to the Oscar-winning form and mien of The Pianist, 2002) as he meets America, with the Statue of Liberty heaving grainily into view, pointedly upside down, after a long Atlantic crossing. A Holocaust survivor, separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) in the war, he arrives in the States penniless, with no outlet for the substantial architectural qualif ications that brought him renown in his homeland. 

Designing for the utilitarian Philadelphia furniture store run by his assimilated cousin Attila (an excellent Alessandro Nivola) is a spirit-sinking alternative; heroin numbs the pain of poverty and social isolation. Wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) arrives as an unlikely and unreliable patron. Initially aghast when Toth redesigns the library of his New England gothic mansion in starkly minimalist fashion, he takes a few years to decide he’s seen the future, returning to the now-destitute architect with a golden-handcuffs commission: to conceive and build a towering, multimillion-dollar community centre on his forbidding country estate. Demanding all Toth’s creative labour in return for bed, board and the expensive passage of Erzsébet and their mute niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to America, Van Buren is a vanity capitalist with delusions of humanitarian grandeur. When he and Toth reveal plans for a startlingly severe hillside monolith rendered in unyielding concrete, the community recoils.

The ingenious intricacies of Toth’s seemingly blunt, confrontational design aren’t evident even to its collaborators, just as Corbet’s filmmaking is awash with supple grace notes – the lurches and quivers of Lol Crawley’s tactile cinematography, the finely character-tailored prints and silhouettes of Kate Forbes’ costumes – within the granite-like heft of its construction. The Brutalist, at this point, begins to show its ideological teeth, examining what manner of art can be created under the auspices of vulgar money men, and at what cost to the artist’s soul. That the Church is a significant investor in the project, demanding chapel space, is a point of tacit frustration to Toth. Meanwhile, growing pressure from Erzsébet and Zsofia to abandon America and start anew in Jerusalem threatens another kind of defeat for the man determined to forge his own specific design for living.

Brody, a mass of internal wounds contained in one frail, defensive, substance dependent frame, mournfully articulates the kind of stringent artistic principle that isn’t served by manifest destiny. Pearce, riveting as a man whose brawny mid-Atlantic bluster barely conceals a nervous, queer insecurity, is his opposite number temperamentally and philosophically, though he too is thwarted by the blander ideals of the American Dream. Both stately and furious, Corbet’s film identifies a yearning tragedy in both schools of masculinity, and in the symbiotic but ultimately destructive relationship between a visionary in need of an enabler, and an investor in search of a higher calling.

► The Brutalist is available in UK cinemas from 24 January 2025.