Film Review: The Brutalist

The Brutalist arrives at a rotten time in American history, as our long-uplifted origin story as a nation of immigrants, founded on the premise of freedom of religion, is being rewritten in real time by a rising demonization of immigrants, and a rising threat of Christian nationalism.

The film – Brady Corbet’s third feature, and an epic achievement – is set in the Forties and Fifties, but you can be certain the filmmakers intended The Brutalist to be in conversation with what’s happening today. For all its fine-hewn observations – into people damaged by war, loss, racial and religious intolerance – and its intimate access to bodies as they bathe, fuck, and pile on even more damage to themselves, the subject of The Brutalist is no less than America, full stop, end of sentence … and maybe stick a fork in it.

It begins with the arrival of a Hungarian Jew named László (The Pianist Oscar winner Adrien Brody) to America in 1947. Jostling through the dusky chaos of an Ellis Island docking until he finally gulps fresh air again, László is euphoric at his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. Except the camera, cockeyed, frames Lady Liberty at an angle, mimicking László’s own field of vision. She’s upside down, then perpendicular to the ground, askew. It bodes badly.

But it’s easy to forget that ominous start once László gets moving – and The Brutalist indeed moves, despite its three-and-a-half-hour running time. When László rides a bus to start a new life in Philadelphia, Corbet takes pains to film the road ahead whizzing by, a regular motif, signaling a future thrumming with possibility, and a reminder these roads were likely built by immigrant hands.

In Philadelphia, László reconnects with a cousin (Nivolo) who has dropped his accent and acquired a Catholic wife. They go into business together making furniture, which puts László on a path to meet an American titan of industry (which industry? unclear) named Van Buren (Pearce). That chance encounter leads to László – a renowned architect in the Brutalism school, until Nazis ravaged Europe – earning a commission to build an ambitious community center in the suburbs of Philadelphia for Van Buren.

That is perhaps too much plot detail, but it barely scratches the surface of a film that is novelistic in the best of ways – in its thematic ambition, its finesse with the interiority of these complex characters. But the experience of The Brutalist is an intensely cinematic one. Shot on VistaVision, a mostly obsolete widescreen format, The Brutalist wants to pummel you with what cinema can do: in sight, sound, scope. It’s a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, with Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold cannily writing in opportunities for cinematographer Lol Crawley to razzle-dazzle, from that opening uppercut of the Statue of Liberty to a vertiginous marble quarry in Carrara, Italy, to the steel-and-concrete sternness of László’s work-in-progress in Pennsylvania.

VistaVision isn’t the only backward-glancing technique used here: Corbet also inserts an overture and an intermission. The latter is disruptive, by design. It’s an intentional brake-stop to a film that up until then is practically buzzing, and still tendering a tendril of hope that America really is the land of opportunity. The second half, which reunites László with his wife Erzsébet (Jones), puts the lie to that, as they are at the whims of Van Buren and his son (Alwyn). (A privileged, feckless son set to inherit the family business who refuses to fairly compensate workers and plainly despises immigrants? Wherever did they find the inspiration?)

The second half seethes. It’s not subtle. The film literalizes the damage done by the ruling class in ways that are shocking, but they land. Still, the film’s previous command of the pacing starts to flag. You feel the minutes. You feel the definition on László and Erzsébet, so vividly portrayed by Brody and Jones in career-best performances, start to blur. An epilogue tries the patience – this close to the end, you really want to spend all this time on an Eighties bop and establishing shots of Venice? – and whiffed of the affectation spotting Corbet’s previous films, Vox Lux and The Children of a Leader. But it wasn’t enough to rupture the thrall The Brutalist had on me, or to dampen my eagerness to make sense of a film that can feel thrillingly uncontainable, even after two viewings.

215 minutes, you say? Sure, let’s go again.

Find movie times.

This article appears in January 10 • 2025.