The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a formally ambitious, emotionally charged cinematic construction that, despite certain scriptual fragilities and uneven pacing, leaves a lasting impression due to the sheer gravitas of its protagonist —a magnetic Adrien Brody in perhaps the most contained and tragic role of his career— who inhabits with stoic depth the figure of László Toth, a fictional exiled modernist architect whose journey from postwar Europe to industrial Pennsylvania becomes a parable of idealism, trauma and compromise, articulating through architecture the tension between utopia and capital; Corbet’s direction, both rigorous and sensuous, builds a layered atmosphere where monumentalism is not merely aesthetic but ideological, questioning whether visionary architecture can survive without being co-opted by power, especially as the narrative pivots on the conflict between Toth’s wounded moral clarity and the seductive charisma of industrialist Van Buren —a patron figure whose wealth enables yet distorts the architectural dream, drawing parallels with the patronage dynamics of postwar America; visually composed like a series of static tableaux that recall the austerity of Tarkovsky or the severity of early Haneke, the film constructs space as psychic terrain, using concrete, steel and misty light to underscore the emotional estrangement of its characters, while sound design and silence become tools of tension and interiority; although the narrative at times falls into schematic binaries —genius vs industry, Europe vs America, memory vs ambition— its strength lies in its cinematic architecture, a slow, weighty unfolding that asks not whether architecture can change the world, but at what ethical cost such transformation is made visible, making The Brutalist a rare and haunting artefact of intellectual cinema.