‘The Brutalist’ movie review: Adrien Brody bolsters Brady Corbet’s overwhelming edifice on the American Dream

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is the kind of project that seems willed into existence by sheer conviction alone. A stark, unflinching, and rigorously designed meditation on ambition, power, and the immigrant experience, the film unfolds with the same extended grandiosity as the clean, concrete constructs its protagonist spends his life erecting. Running a formidable 202 minutes and shot on 70mm film stock, Corbet’s third feature is both an ode to and an interrogation of the American Dream as a myth that invites reinvention while exacting a brutal toll.

The story charts the decades-spanning fictional life of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who arrives in postwar America with little more than his talent and an indomitable belief in his work. He is not, at first glance, a particularly malleable émigré — his accent remains thick, his sense of self resolute — but America, as Corbet suggests, has its own ways of sculpting the displaced into the shapes it requires. Brody, in his most arresting performance since The Pianist, plays Tóth as a man whose very features seem designed for endurance: the gauntness of his face, the unwavering gaze, a skeletal frame that bends but never quite breaks under the weight of history and trauma.

The unremitting cinephile in Corbet constructs the film with an almost clinical precision, favouring static, geometric compositions that mirror the architecture at its heart. The camera rarely moves unless compelled by narrative force, and emphasises on the tension between human frailty and the immovable structures left behind in our wake. But if The Brutalist feels like a monument chiseled on celluloid, much of that credit belongs to cinematographer Lol Crawley and composer Daniel Blumberg, whose work elevates Corbet’s vision from an austere “intellectually stimulating” exercise to something genuinely operatic. 

A still from ‘The Brutalist’
| Photo Credit:
A24

Every shadow lends the film a haunting physicality, making the spaces feel cavernous, imposing, almost indifferent to the people inhabiting them. Shot in VistaVision, Corbet’s shots feel heavy with intent, as though carved out of stone. And Blumberg’s breathtaking score looms over, a spectral presence of groaning strings and fractured melodies that evokes the loftiness of ambition and the quiet, gnawing terror of its cost. Together, they turn The Brutalist into something mythic — an edifice, built to last.

Central to Tóth’s rise (and inevitable undoing) is his benefactor, tormentor, and eventually something far worse — Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, who commissions the architect to design an institute in his mother’s honour. Their relationship is transactional, cruel, and exploitative, and Van Buren feigns interest in Tóth’s artistic integrity to pursue the ways in which he can be controlled. Pearce plays him as a man so assured of his own power that he finds genuine amusement in the suffering of those beneath him. His interactions with Tóth, filled with condescending praise and veiled threats, evoke a twisted paternalism.

Corbet’s script, co-written with Mona Fastvold, is dense and unrelenting, filled with sharp observations on art, commerce, and the limits of resilience. At its best, it captures the intoxicating lure of creative ambition — the belief that great art can transcend circumstance — while simultaneously exposing the brutal reality that art is often at the mercy of those who finance it. The film’s title, then, is loaded: brutalism as an architectural movement was defined by raw, functional design, but Corbet is more interested in brutality as a condition of existence, particularly for those who are disposable, trying to build something permanent in the world.

A still from ‘The Brutalist’
| Photo Credit:
A24

If there is a design flaw in The Brutalist, it’s the manner in which its eclipsing scope sometimes diminishes its characters and turns them into symbols more than people. Felicity Jones, as Erzsébet, Tóth’s long-suffering wife, is given little to do beyond voicing reason and frustration. She is the foil to his obsession, the one who sees the system for what it is while Tóth remains entranced by what he wants it to be. Yet her moments of agency feel preordained, as if she too is merely another outline in Corbet’s blueprints.

The Brutalist is a film about exile — from one’s homeland, one’s own story, one’s own work. By the time the epilogue arrives, Laszlo’s formerly mute niece, Zsofia, now speaks with the easy confidence of someone who has inherited history, smoothing the jagged edges of her uncle’s suffering into a tidy billing of perseverance. 

Laszlo is silent, his body frail, his voice now stolen by time. Zsofia inscribes his legacy vicariously and reduces his suffering to a moral fable. Her fixation on the “destination” over the treacherous road it took to get there echoes the tidy moral certainties that have weaponised past horrors into present-day policy, and commandeered the voices of the dead to lay claim to land, legacy, and the malleability of history. His final creation has metastasised into something else entirely — co-opted, commodified, and, in the most damning irony of all, used as a monument to insidious ideals he never believed in. 

It’s not a film for the impatient, nor does it make concessions to accessibility, but The Brutalist, warrantsattention, rewards scrutiny, and lingers long after its final, unsparing frames. Corbet has crafted something unique: a film tremendous and unyielding in both form and philosophy. It is, in every sense, a monolith that refuses to crumble under its weighty ambitions.