Title: The Brutalist

Director: Brady Corbet

Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, Alessandro Nivola,

Where: In theatres near you

Rating: 3.5 Stars 

With its evocative title, the film alludes to both the architectural style it references and the stark, unembellished nature of its storytelling. Through meticulous construction and unyielding vision, it both embodies and critiques the ideology behind its title—a world where ambition, ideology, and survival intertwine in jagged, unadorned lines. The film is either an austere masterpiece or an oppressive monolith, depending on one’s perspective.

At its core is László Tóth (a haunted and haunting Adrien Brody), a Jewish-Hungarian architect whose arrival in postwar America is less a rebirth than a slow, bruising negotiation with fate. Brody’s performance is a study in endurance, his László a man perpetually at odds with a world oscillating between brutal rejection and grudging admiration. He is welcomed into a society that tolerates his genius but not his foreignness.  It rewards his ambition while simultaneously seeking to reshape him—his nose, his name, his very identity—to better fit its rigid mould.

Corbet, never for understatement, layers the film with historical weight and existential urgency. The film’s sweeping three-hour-plus runtime allows its themes to settle, like concrete drying into form. The film is less about architecture than the forces that shape and erode a life: the compromises made in pursuit of legacy, the price of artistic integrity, and the unspoken rules of assimilation. It is a portrait of the immigrant experience painted in stark, unyielding strokes.

The film’s supporting cast serves as a chorus of contradictions and betrayals. Alessandro Nivola’s Attila, László’s cousin, has reinvented himself as a Catholic businessman, a walking parable of survival through erasure. Emma Laird’s Audrey (Attila’s wife) watches László with the cold, appraising eye of someone assessing not just a relative but a liability. And then there is Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr., a tycoon as monstrous as he is mesmerizing. His patronage is both a lifeline and a death sentence, his whims determining László’s fate with a casual cruelty that mirrors the very system László seeks to carve a place within. 

Visually, the film is staggering. Lol Crawley’s cinematography turns architecture into destiny, framing characters as though they are swallowed by the structures around them. The opening sequence, with an inverted Statue of Liberty looming like an omen, sets the tone: freedom and dislocation, grandeur and alienation, forever entwined. Corbet’s directorial choices are unapologetically bold, from the film’s sweeping orchestral score to its arresting, near-mythic imagery. Yet for all its spectacle, the film is at its best in the quiet moments—the intensity of a gaze, the hesitation in a handshake, the unspoken transactions that determine who belongs and who remains an outsider.

The film sometimes buckles under its ambition, with Corbet’s meticulous world-building occasionally stifling its humanity. Its grandeur can feel distancing, and its intellectual heft is more imposing than inviting. But perhaps that is the point— the film does not comfort; it confronts. It examines the price of permanence, questioning who leaves a mark on history and who is erased. Like the architecture it evokes, the film demands to be seen, understood, and, ultimately, endured.