In Brady Corbet’s haunting and ambitious The Brutalist, a film both sculpted and shattered by memory, trauma finds its monument. At 213 minutes, the film is not so much a viewing experience as a slow immersion into grief’s architectural blueprint; fortified, unmoving, and deeply human. With its quiet intensity and intellectual rigor, The Brutalist emerges as a Holocaust film not of atrocity, but of aftermath; where survival itself becomes a haunted, unlivable space.
Adrian Brody, in what may be the most layered performance of his career, plays László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who immigrates to postwar New York after enduring the unimaginable. The year is ambiguous, but the air is still thick with the ash of war. Tóth is a man displaced from history, a ghost with blueprints. Felicity Jones plays Erzsébet, his long-separated wife, and Raffey Cassidy rounds out the fragile family unit as their orphaned niece, Zsófia; each of them spectral reminders of a Europe that no longer exists, and perhaps never did.
Structured in four movements, like a concerto composed in mourning, the film follows Tóth’s reluctant journey into the American Dream, a dream that materializes first in sawdust and furniture, then in poured concrete and profit. Taken in by a distant cousin and then discarded after familial betrayals, Tóth finds himself in the employ of a gilded family of American industrialists: the Van Burens. Joe Alwyn plays Harry Lee Van Buren with a cold charisma that belies his character’s subtle cruelties, while Guy Pearce’s Harrison Van Buren exudes a patrician menace so restrained it barely needs to speak aloud. When it finally does, in a chilling European flashback sequence, it lands like a whisper that flattens buildings.
Corbet, whose Vox Lux revealed his fixation with fame, media, and the grotesque splendor of suffering, turns now to architecture as narrative. The buildings László constructs; monolithic, severe, often misread as soulless, are in fact secret testaments. Concrete becomes elegy. Brutalism, in Corbet’s hands, is recontextualized not as an aesthetic of cold modernity, but as a vocabulary for mourning, a language formed in the shadows of barbed wire and smoke stacks. That the very clients commissioning these structures; wealthy Americans blind to the trauma buried within the walls they so covet, see only chic foreign modernism is the film’s most biting irony. They buy pain and call it progress. They walk through trauma daily, unaware it’s holding up the ceiling.
As Tóth’s life rises and collapses, The Brutalist maps a slow deterioration: of dignity, of health, of illusion. Erzsébet’s illness becomes a second war to survive. Drugs, disillusionment, and classist cruelties pile atop the already unbearable. Yet, for all its bleakness, the film resists nihilism. It flickers with grace: in the crack of sunlight across raw concrete, in a brief family reunion, in Zsófia’s quiet coming-of-age. Corbet’s vision is punctuated by moments of unexpected lyricism, and in the film’s final act; where an older Zsófia confronts the legacy of survival, László imparts a line both radical and tragic: “It is the destination, not the journey.” In a culture that sanctifies striving, this reversal is devastatingly honest. For those who emerged from the camps, the journey was carnage. The destination, even if modest, even if fragile, is everything.
The Brutalist is not a film that invites comfort. It builds, layer by careful layer, into a silent thunder. Its power is cumulative, like grief. Its message is clear: what we build tells the story of what we’ve endured. And sometimes, what we endure is hidden in plain sight, poured into the very foundations of our most revered structures. Necessary and unrelenting, The Brutalist is not just a film. It is a monument.
