Broad Sound

If it feels impossible to write about a painting movie without using the obvious metaphorical palette, try writing about The Brutalist without comparing it to its subject’s subject. Everything about its construction seems designed to earn the word “monumental”: it’s a 215-minute historical epic (complete with a 15-minute intermission!) that looks and sounds and feels like nothing else, even as it evokes the kinds of serious-minded auteurs it might appear sacrilegious to reference alongside modern movies. But director Brady Corbet manages to scrape that sky the old-fashioned way: by laying a foundation of rock-solid cinematic blocks and slowly building upward.

The film never explicitly mentions the architectural style it’s named after, but its central architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), appears to be partly modeled on a real Brutalist, Marcel Breuer, whose theories on architecture offer a blueprint for the film’s structure. 

“Objects acquire a form corresponding to their function,” Breuer said, and this idea of pragmatism as creative expression defined much of his work. Transposing this theory from literal architecture to the cinematic variety, The Brutalist allows its story to dictate the terms of its construction.  

A core tenet of Brutalism, as practiced by Breuer and others throughout the 20th century, is a respect for, and emphasis on, the building materials themselves. Peter Smithson—another defining Brutalist alongside his wife, Alison—posited that Brutalism was about “the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand.” 

Brutalists’ minimalist designs brought the base elements of construction—concrete, glass, steel, wood—to the forefront of the work; unhidden by the ornamental flourishes of prior architectural movements, structure became substance. In The Brutalist, László may source his stone from a mystical Italian quarry, but his buildings never ask anything more of the material than to simply do what stone does, and be what stone is, magnificently. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” he asks. 

As if to answer László’s question, the best map to The Brutalist’s soul is found in its architecture. The raw materials of Corbet’s film are no less dazzling than that Italian marble, but like any good work of Brutalism, no one element jostles for your attention. The performances, the script, the cinematography, the score—it’s all showy in its unshowiness, form following function following form until they meld into something singular. 

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Corbet didn’t achieve singularity in a single go. The Brutalist is the former indie actor’s third feature as a writer/director, following 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux—both of which boasted an impressive formalism that risked overpowering some bizarre story beats. Here, Corbet finds the perfect narrative match for his technical talents: a Hungarian-Jewish architect, László, whose pursuit of abstract truth through concrete form allows both artists to approach the sublime via the sturdy. 

Part of The Brutalist’s firm foundation lies in its fairly straightforward plot. Fleeing post-war Budapest, László leaves his family in Europe and emigrates to Pennsylvania, where his talents are promptly co-opted by a charismatic robber baron, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce). Harrison’s patronage of László is passably generous when he first contracts the architect to design a community center honoring the tycoon’s late mother, but its vampiric nature is gradually revealed as the construction gets underway. 

The story, though specific, is not exactly unbroken ground: an immigrant is sold an American Dream with invisible fine print. But that minimalist elevator pitch is… well, elevated by the sheer effectiveness of the cinematic materials. Most salient is Lol Crawley’s cinematography; the first thing we see onscreen (after the A24 logo) is a notice that the movie was shot in VistaVision film format—calling attention to the “filminess” of the film, as Peter Smithson might say. Others might call it artsiness for artsiness’s sake, but this is (re)invention born out of practicality: Corbet and Crawley revived this largely antiquated process of feeding film through the camera horizontally instead of vertically because it results in wider frames—all the better to capture the sprawling architectural works they had in mind. 

And sure enough, from the rolling hills of Pennsylvania to the gilded canals of Venice, Crawley grandly puts the “vista” in “VistaVision.” But his camera is never above getting down and dirty when the moment calls for it, just as ready to shakily immerse us in the euphoria of László’s arrival at Ellis Island or the stupor of his acquired drug problem as it is to capture the majesty of Europe. Again, form follows function to the benefit of both. Because we’ve been primed to notice the film format in the first place, it’s easier to appreciate it even in less resplendent settings; coal yards and basements and other unremarkable places are rendered beautiful because they’re being photographed with remarkable materials.

Daniel Blumberg’s score is similarly in sync with the story’s needs, matching (or setting) the tone by swelling from the tinkling pianos of ingenuity to the booming brass of American industry. One of the main themes quotes the opening of David Maslanka’s Symphony No. 4, which itself reinterprets the “Old Hundredth,” a traditional Christian hymn melody dating back to the 16th century. Whether or not these references are intentional, their overlapping melodies are all fittingly unadorned, showcasing the elegance of the most basic notes of the musical scale. Backed by the sturdiness of musical history and theory, these foundational motifs are built up by towers of horns until they soar like Crawley’s cinematography, everything working in tandem to create a tactile, load-bearing object. 

Striding confidently across that understructure are the actors. With well-matched but opposing vigor, Pearce and Brody dig into the pragmatic script (written by Corbet and his life and writing partner, Mona Fastvold): Brody plays László like an immigrant version of Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, torn between the way his genius demands things be done and the way his designs are rerouted by Pearce’s grinning blend of capitalism and egoism. (Are the two ever separable?) 

Both actors are all-in. Brody in particular feels like he was built for this role, or made to be subsumed by it; even his famously broken nose is given a textual justification, his character taking on the characteristics (or materials) of the actor portraying him. (The ethics of AI-assisted accent modulation aside, to discount the totality of his work here on account of minor tweaks to some brief Hungarian voiceovers seems as anti-art as anything else—and it appears the Academy would agree.) Pearce, meanwhile, seems to be having the time of his life playing a man so rich and charming that he can’t understand why he wasn’t given talent, too. In a movie that can feel imposingly serious at times, his awestruck reactions to László’s artistry give us a welcome chance to laugh.

All of this assured, careful foundation-laying brings us to the movie’s intermission, which—like everything else worth noting about The Brutalist—is built into the film itself. The Brutalists were not ones for wasted space, and so even this mandatory pause is both functional and formal: it’s a necessary reprieve so people can focus on a film this long without being distracted by bathroom breaks, but it also perfectly bifurcates the movie, allowing the more straightforward first half to lock into our minds before the enigmatic second half opens them up. 

[INTERMISSION]

The essentialism of even Breuer’s most minimalist works—think of his iconic chairs, recreated by László in the film—raises questions. The bare, streamlined nature of their design calls attention to their functional purpose, but also to the absence of the embellishments we’re used to seeing. What is here (or not here) in lieu of the expected? How do we fill in the gaps? 

As he moved from chairs to buildings, Breuer’s structures retained the power of these implicit question marks. When the Abbot of St. John’s Abbey Church in Minnesota commissioned a reimagined design for the Abbey, he tasked Breuer with “building a church which will be truly an architectural monument to the service of God … The Benedictine tradition at its best challenges us to think boldly and to cast our ideals in forms which will be valid for centuries to come.” This charge hints at an intriguing paradox answered by Breuer’s Brutalism: its reliance on simple, sturdy materials begets a timeless durability, even as its shapes are so minimalist they become challengingly abstract. Less becomes more, and enduringly so: there is something else here, some mystery towards which all these solid elements are pointed. 

Harrison is no architect, but in describing how he wants the community center to honor his mother, he touches on this idea: “This shall be a sacred enough space that her soul might inhabit it!” In all their unmoving formalism, Brutalist works still have to leave room for the breath of life. After all, they exist to be containers of some human function, the very humanity of which could never be perfectly traced by something as rigid as stone.

Perhaps because of this, László’s buildings, like Breuer’s, all have some aspect of communion with the unknown: concrete slabs pivot to let the air in; skylights filter in the heavens. Similarly, The Brutalist begins to ventilate its relatively self-contained story, leaving events open to interpretation and inviting less-containable ideas—about addiction, personal and political violence, and legacy—to percolate. 

The post-intermission arrival of László’s ailing wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), complicates things between the men. Jones’s steely gaze sees clearly through the subtle concessions László has made to his sponsor, and the film’s back half is shaped by questions about the true cost of those concessions—and whether their reward could ever be worth it. That gaze may be more than just steely, actually; in one of the movie’s many evocations of mystery, it’s suggested that the osteoporosis Erzsébet developed from wartime malnutrition also endowed her with a sort of second sight, allowing her to watch her husband from afar through all his trials and indiscretions. 

The ambiguities don’t end there. As the film’s form evolves to match its increasingly abstract function, straightforward events—like a train derailing while carrying materials for László’s building—are shot as anything but. In this case, the train is filmed from a bird’s-eye view, giving us the distant impression of a crash with little more than clouds flaring with fiery orange. 

Later, when László and Harrison go to the Italian quarry, they might as well be on Mount Olympus, for all it resembles a recognizable locale. We spend most of our time there in eerie close-up, with pre-lapped audio echoing off the marble as the men are seemingly hypnotized by the fog and the enchanting rock. Some of these unexpected choices might be explained by the film’s deceptively modest budget (reportedly less than $10 million), but what’s the difference? Production constraint or not, the mystifying effect is the same.

The character motivations also become less obvious as the movie does, twisting the somewhat predictable arcs established in the first half toward unpredictable ends. As the relationship between László and Harrison grows more toxic, the baron takes brutal advantage of the architect. Reeling from this assault and grasping for any antidote to his wife’s illness, László drags Erzsébet down into his heroin addiction, leading to her near-death and his unremembered admission about Harrison’s attack. 

This all sets up a murky, elliptical culmination. After Erzsébet confronts him for raping her husband, Harrison disappears, leading to an impressionistic search through the nearly-completed community center that ends on the suggestion that the tycoon took his own life in the belly of his life’s work. Before we can process that, we’re jumping decades and continents to an epilogue set at a Venetian architectural forum, where an elderly László is being honored for a career of excellence. 

The celebratory tone feels at odds with everything we’ve just watched László go through, but as the speaker puts it, “his lifelong ambition was not only to define an epoch but to transcend all time.” This tracks with how we’ve heard László describe his work, and the very existence of a career retrospective suggests he achieved his goal. But as to what it cost him to get there—or what it ultimately earned him—we have only a silent look from a wheelchair-bound László to go by.  

The speaker (László’s once-mute niece, speaking for her now-mute uncle) ends by quoting something László supposedly told her: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” A nice line to end on, but is it true, really? Not for László, who wears the scars of his journey—out of the Holocaust, across an ocean, into the horrors of American greed—on his face even as his arrival is applauded. The Smithsons claimed that Brutalism intended to “drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work.” That’s not a bad way to describe László’s life, or the art that The Brutalist makes of it. But it also implies something the film reinforces with both its form and function: that those forces—the journey, the materials, the concrete, the film stock—matter just as much as what you make with them. 

While the inscrutability of its ending could be the result of an incomplete vision, the film’s formal confidence and the metatextual parallels between its subject and its structure suggest an intentional design. The final object echoes a description of László’s buildings we hear in the epilogue: both director and architect use the solidity of their constructions to draw our mind’s eye upward, getting it moving toward Something Bigger but not clearly defining (or constricting) what, leaving us to find the shape of our takeaways ourselves. That’s not to say that the movie is unfinished—both its ending and its epilogue are uniquely thrilling—just that I’m not finished thinking about it. 

Nor would I want to be. Each time my mind wanders back through its massive edifice, my thoughts branch from the obvious core, stumbling anew down some fresh thematic or narrative wing. “It is a liberated space—to be experienced not only by your eye, but felt by your touch: dimensions and modulations corresponding to your steps and movements, embracing the embracing landscape.” That’s Breuer talking about Frank Lloyd Wright, but it could just as well describe what Corbet has built with The Brutalist. 

Your own estimation of his achievement may depend on how you feel about Brutalism in general. There are plenty of works that adhere just as closely to Brutalist theory and yet are seen as ugly and oppressive; just because their form is ostensibly drawn from their function, that doesn’t mean the balance can’t be off, or that the function might not have been better served by something more traditionally beautiful or satisfying. Some will no doubt be similarly frustrated by Corbet’s choices—this is not a filmmaker interested in compromising one block of his three-hour tower, no matter how thorny or disconcerting things can get. 

Ironically (and controversially), that also means utilizing limited generative AI to inspire some of the film’s architectural renderings, a “tool” that it’s difficult to imagine Breuer or his ilk trusting even if they’d had access to it. Yet even that complicated decision was seemingly made in the name of single-minded ambition, with Corbet unwilling to let trivialities like budget constraints or a lack of Breuer-level architects keep him from maximizing the materials he did have. 

Whether or not all of his choices are artistically “correct,” the center holds true to the spirit of Brutalism. In making a movie in the mold of its inspiration, Corbet has crafted something strong and tall enough to house an American epic, but striking and open-ended enough to challenge our convictions—to allow space for our ambiguous takeaways to roam, to evolve every time we return to the structure. Elucidating where all of its various wings go, or why, would serve little use here even if I could do it; these are things the viewer should experience for themselves. He’s built us the container. Will our souls inhabit it?