The Brutalist

Directed by Brady Corbet
Starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce
Opens 24 January 2025
8/10

“Don't bury me in this prairie,” sang Dinah Shore in 1948, longing for some of that big city living. “Take me where the cement grows”. The song, “Buttons and Bows” shows up early in Brady Corbet’s intense, dazzlingly ambitious epic and the words, if not the levity, set the tone for the three hours to come.

The Brutalist is a film about concrete dreams: the ones dreamt by László Tóth (Adrien Brody), the visionary modernist architect we follow from war-torn Budapest, through the squalor and wonder of post-war New York to the fields of 1950s Pennsylvania. And those of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), the brash, bullying industrialist who commissions Roth to design a lasting monument to his beloved mother.

It’s a film that is proudly swinging not just for the fences but for the city limits. Born in Arizona, director Brady Corbet was a jobbing child actor who made his film debut as the teenage Alan Tracy in the misbegotten live action Thunderbirds (2004), but has since remarkably reinvented himself as a protégé of Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, adapting a Sartre short story for his directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and then casting Natalie Portman as a damaged, demented pop diva in 2018’s Vox Lux. 

There’s a bold invigorating energy to the first half of the film, as Toth makes his way from the soup kitchens to his cousin’s furniture shop in the suburbs, a sense that Corbet is willing to pull out the cinematic stops like few American directors this side of Paul Thomas Anderson. The film looks simply stunning, whether lingering in Manhattan brothels or admiring the light in the library Tóth designs for the Van Burens. So you’re willing to forgive the moments that feel as mawkish as a Norman Rockwell painting or as grandiose as King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (if that film were a hymn to Jewish genius rather a quasi-fascist homily).

Brody and Pearce are superb as the co-dependent protagonists, both relishing the opportunity to stride around construction sites, each believing themselves the great auteur of the project, finally struggling for ultimate control. But somewhere in the second half (the film rather proudly insists on a 15 minute interval) as construction begins in earnest, and the pristine dreams of the blueprint give way to the daily grind of construction, the film loses its furious momentum, even as it races through decades. 

The Brutalist is dedicated to the memory of Scott Walker (his scores to Corbet’s first two films were the last projects he completed before his death in 2019), and there’s something of Scott’s madly ostentatious Europhilia to the film, his insistence that the pop song could be a church broad enough to welcome Bergman, Stockhausen, Brel and Pasolini. Corbet may still be finding his own distinctive voice as a director, but The Brutalist is a magnificent statement of intent.