The Brutalist (2024) Review: Concrete, Capital and Exile

Is The Brutalist worth watching?

Yes. The Brutalist is a towering achievement, an American epic in the grand old style that uses its size to make a severe, modern argument about art, money and who gets to belong. Brady Corbet’s film is formally audacious, beautifully shot and anchored by a career-best Adrien Brody. It is long and demanding, and its final movement reaches for a statement its earlier hours had already made more subtly, but the ambition is so fully realised that the flaws feel like the price of daring.

What is The Brutalist about?

László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is a Hungarian-Jewish architect, trained in the modernist tradition, who survives the Holocaust and arrives in America after the war. Separated from his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who remains stranded in Europe, he finds work in Pennsylvania and struggles to rebuild a life. Then he attracts the attention of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist who sees in him both genius and an opportunity. Van Buren’s patronage promises László the chance to build again on a scale he had lost, but the terms of that promise are never quite what they seem.

The Brutalist was directed by Brady Corbet, who wrote it with Mona Fastvold. It is an American production, largely in English with passages in Hungarian and other languages, and it runs 215 minutes including an intermission. It won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice, and Brody won the Academy Award for Best Actor, with further Oscars for its cinematography and score.

An epic built like one of László’s buildings

Corbet has made a film that looks and feels like its subject. Shot in VistaVision, a widescreen format largely abandoned decades ago, it has a density of image that gives interiors, quarries and construction sites real weight. Lol Crawley’s photography frames bodies against concrete, stone and steel, so that the architecture becomes a character: imposing, beautiful and sometimes suffocating.

The structure is equally deliberate. An overture, a two-part story with an intermission, and a restless, driving score by Daniel Blumberg give the film the grandeur of an old studio epic. But Corbet uses that grandeur for ideas rather than spectacle. The film is about what happens when an artist’s vision depends on the wealth of people who will never fully accept him, and the scale makes that dependence feel oppressive.

Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce at the peak of their powers

Brody’s performance is the film’s foundation. László is proud, damaged, funny and stubborn, a man whose intellectual confidence survives everything the world has done to him but whose body and spirit are visibly worn. Brody lets the character’s accent, posture and small silences tell the story of what he has lived through, without leaning on explanation.

Guy Pearce is extraordinary opposite him. Van Buren is charming, generous and funny, and Pearce makes it easy to see why László is drawn in, but the actor keeps something cold and proprietorial in his eyes. Their relationship, all flattery and power and unspoken contempt, is one of the most complex screen partnerships of recent years. Felicity Jones arrives later but brings a sharp intelligence and moral force to Erzsébet, and Joe Alwyn and Raffey Cassidy add memorable support.

Where the ambition overreaches

A film of this size will inevitably overextend somewhere, and The Brutalist does in its final stretch. After hours of patient, implicit storytelling, the closing movement states its themes more directly than it needs to, and the shift in tone is jarring. Some viewers will also find the second half’s darker turns heavy-handed.

Those are arguments about emphasis, not failures of craft. The film’s willingness to swing this hard is inseparable from what makes it remarkable.

Who should watch The Brutalist?

It is essential for serious drama lovers, for anyone interested in architecture, immigration or the history of postwar America, and for viewers who miss the ambition of old-fashioned epics. Set aside an evening: it is three and a half hours, including an intermission. The film includes sexual content, drug use, strong language and a disturbing scene of sexual violence, and its themes of trauma and exploitation are handled with unflinching seriousness.

If it grips you, three natural companions:

• The Godfather Part II, another immigrant epic about the price of success in America.
• Whiplash, a much smaller film about the cost of artistic obsession and the people who exploit it.
• Schindler’s List, which confronts the history that László carries with him into the new world.

The verdict

The Brutalist is a monumental, morally serious film that restores the grandeur of the American epic and gives it a conscience. Its last movement overreaches, but Adrien Brody’s performance, Guy Pearce’s chilling patron and Brady Corbet’s formal daring make it one of the essential films of its decade.

Rating: 5/5