The Brutalist

The Brutalist is a grand, epic drama on a scale rarely found in contemporary film: a product of a singular, passionate vision. Brady Corbet’s determination to create an expansive epic, over three and a half hours long, led him to develop the film over six years. He even went to the lengths of shooting a mainly American-set film in Hungary and Tuscany in pursuit of his ambition, using the 1950s format of Vistavision. The film follows László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect, who arrives in post-war America after surviving the Holocaust. Tóth begins a relentless pursuit of the American Dream and the personal and artistic fulfilment it seems to promise, setting his sights on revolutionary architectural projects after being taken in by a wealthy benefactor. In Tóth’s growing megalomania, Corbet questions the singular ambition of his own filmmaking style. This makes the film highly relevant to contemporary quandaries about obsessive artists and the real-life harm they can do, besides its powerful deconstruction of the promise of America.

James O’Connell Nash