The Brutalist Beautifully Builds a Towering Immigration Epic

Much like its subject’s architectural undertakings, The Brutalist–actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet’s mammoth mid-century odyssey–has been long in the making: six years, two principal casts, and countless obstacles, to be exact. And it shows, in sheer craft and consideration. You don’t have to look further than the opening credits.

A strange busy body of text crawls horizontally across the screen in one long train of evolving brutalist design, country roads at dawn racing by behind the text in superwide shots strapped to the grill of a speeding car, a la Fury Road. The sequence takes off to the sound of chugging cellos and an anvil of a drum. Wincing violins and clanking piano keys trickle in with an offbeat dissonance that complicates the breathtaking beauty of it all.

The opening credits drop ceremoniously after Jewish-Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody in career-topping work) emerges from the dark chaos of an immigration vessel, elated by the upside down sight of the Statue of Liberty, the framing a harbinger of the cruel, stifled brand of liberty given to Jewish immigrants in 1947 America. An ambient orchestral wail cries out, followed by a blaring French horn, a triumphant foreboding bursting from the brass tube, courtesy of experimental indie rocker Daniel Blumberg’s riveting score, unbelievably only the second of his career.

Arriving in the country on his own–wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) still stuck back in Europe, now under punishing Soviet rule–László gets a job and accompanying lodging in Philadelphia from Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a fellow Hungarian Jew who knows the hardship of immigrating. But also, imperatively, Attila knows what László is capable of.

An insanely accomplished architect, László is implied to be near-legendary in his prime, but is living below the radar as a result of the war (He survived Buchenwald and Erzsébet and Zsófia survived Dachau, albeit with severe health conditions). He is an understated man–humble, sad-eyed, appreciative, driven–until someone interferes with his plans. He carries no pomp or expectation, despite his achievements, or perhaps because of them, a lasting sense of contentment and meaning imbued by work. Soft, cozy, floating piano lightens the film’s atmosphere often, even when conflicts are in freefall, all moments moored by the same circumstance: László at work. For better or worse, he adores his work.

Attila asks László to design furniture for his home goods store, a modest undertaking for someone of László’s former stature. But he’s very grateful for the offer, and soon he’s commissioned for his first significant project, converting a mogul’s regal study into a personal library. In short, the novelty of the library loses him his work, shelter, and only friend, just before it gains him everything. The space of the library is both very easy and very difficult to describe, so we’ll let you discover it. As László sagely puts it: “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” Leave it to Corbet’s singular cinematic sense to tell a story that absolutely requires visualization.

Guy Pearce is terrific as Harrison Lee Van Buren, a classic cutthroat American entrepreneur who is the first to recognize László’s minimalist genius stateside. Van Buren dons a crystal clear, bourgeois boom of a voice that shouts stubborn, mid century steel man. A self-made mogul, he naturally hates handouts and beggars and all but ignores his eager, overconfident son, Harry, who thrives on nepotism. Harry (Joe Alwyn delivering his first unforgettable role) is a whiny crumb of a manchild who always ends up back on the film’s shirt no matter how many people flick him off.

Harry is responsible for overseeing the project at the heart of the film, a church-gymnasium-auditorium-library architectural wonder that his father commissions László to design and construct in hopes that it will put Doylestown, Pennsylvania on the cultural map. Van Buren commandingly instructs László to build “something new, something boundless” with no clue of what he’s getting himself into. For László, that means a structure previously unseen, one that acts as a political stimulus, one that sparks upheaval in its people. But, as Van Buren muses amidst a crushing hangover, dreams tend to slip away.

For all the wonder and surmounting awe fossilized into the unwieldy operation of erecting the sharp, boundless concrete-marble marvel that László envisions, there is as much shame, uncertainty, betrayal and barbarism. For every beat of affecting brutalism, there is an equally affecting beat of brutality. The influence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s weightiest dramas (in particular, The Master and There Will Be Blood) hover like a specter over Corbet’s storytelling craft–thematic complexity, character depth, narrative scope, adherence to music of the time, earned long takes, crucial scenes closing without closure, and dramatic dick play, for example.

There’s a haunted, sinister feeling in the worn, tenebrous colors of VistaVision film, courtesy of Corbet’s dedication to celluloid (another PTA influence) and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s marvelous vintage rendering of it. Crawley draws out sultry reddish browns, sickly yellows and greens, undersaturated natural light, muted blues, and dark wood grains that swallow the warm candlelight of the New American estate parlors so foreign to immigrants like László.

The film is split in half–“Chapter 1: The Enigma of Arrival” and “Chapter 2: The Hardcore of Beauty”–with the three-and-a-half hour runtime divided by a 15-minute intermission and tagged with an epilogue that brings the span of the epic up to 33 years. The intermission, although obviously nice for the legs and bladder, packs an inimitable punch in the grand scheme of the film’s pacing, swelling the viewer into a frenzy of anticipation as part one comes to an electrifying close via archival Pennsylvania steel ads, Erzsébet’s voiceover reading of a monumental letter, and Blumberg’s prospector’s march of a score.

It makes for some of Corbet’s most impressive direction to date, which is saying a lot about the man who took home the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice in early September. There are, however, a few narratively sluggish moments, but they quickly fade away in the presence of whatever comes next. And they really disappear in the blueprint of the film, which weaves conflicting and increasingly labyrinthine Jewish identities into its construction with masterful nuance.

Corbet keeps the mystery of The Brutalist‘s central project completion or destruction hanging in the air with a real sense of consequence until the final moment. The constant sense of uncertainty stirs up the film’s primary question around every corner: Should László recreate his image elsewhere, in a more hospitable place, or should he devise a way to endure such erosion to form the American image anew, in his own likeness?

Director: Brady Corbet
Writer: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde, Guy Pearce
Release Date: Dec. 20, 2024

Luke Hicks is a New York City film journalist and arts enthusiast by way of Austin, TX. He got his master’s studying film philosophy and ethics at Duke and thinks every occasion should include one of the following: whiskey, coffee, gin, tea, beer, or olives. Love or lambast him on Twitter @lou_kicks.