Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is not merely a film; it is an act of architectural memory, assembled from the rubble of history and the quiet ache of survival. Rooted in its indie-film DNA, this intimate epic, anchored by a career-defining performance from Adrien Brody; rises patiently from the ground up, building toward something at once deeply personal and broadly mythic. It is a film of austere grandeur and aching subtlety, and despite its formidable length, its value is not in duration but in resonance.
THE FILM
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.
PURCHASE THE BRUTALIST IN 4K HERE
THE VIDEO
To call Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist a film is perhaps too narrow. It is a structure, a composition of memory, trauma, and aesthetic rigor; an edifice in motion. So it’s only fitting that its release on 2160p UHD 4K via A24 should mirror its architectural ambitions. Presented in the unusually intimate 1.66:1 aspect ratio; a nod, perhaps, to a more analog past, the film finds new dimensionality, though not necessarily new gloss. Curiously, there is no HDR10 enhancement on this 4K edition, a decision that might disappoint those accustomed to the hyper-lustrous sheen of contemporary home media. But The Brutalist is not a film that gleams. It is one that breathes; measured, grainy, haunted, and Corbet’s mixed-media approach to cinematography (incorporating digital capture, 35mm, and even 16mm) becomes all the more legible in this format.
The result is, quite simply, cinematic architecture. The color palette, meticulously curated, oscillates between cool, somber greens and blues; often used to drape the exteriors in melancholic quiet, and the warmer, more insidious glows of amber and mahogany that fill the Van Buren estates, where opulence masks cruelty. Interiors feel richly upholstered, not just in set design but in tone. Black levels are pleasingly inky, offering deep wells of contrast that allow shadow to act not just as absence, but as character. Skin tones remain unforced and honest—neither idealized nor flattened by overcorrection. The texture is especially striking: facial close-ups yield intimate detail without compromising the softness Corbet clearly intended, while wider shots maintain their depth and clarity.
And then there’s the grain; ever-present, deliberate, and essential. In an era when digital films often emerge from the editing suite buffed into sterility, The Brutalist resists. The grain carries the tactile memory of celluloid, evoking the ghost of mid-century cinema. It looks not like a film made today, but like a film unearthed—something that might have screened in a shuttered Parisian cinema in 1954 or in a lost Hungarian archive. It’s a kind of visual patina, rich with the residue of history. For those who first encountered the film via its 1080p Blu-ray, this 4K release offers more than just resolution; it offers revelation. Textures come alive, light behaves with greater fidelity, and the mosaic of Corbet’s visual strategy becomes sharper in its emotional clarity. Like the buildings its protagonist constructs, The Brutalist is a testament to what can be built in the wake of destruction. And this 4K edition, grain intact and gloss restrained, understands that beauty need not be polished to endure.
THE AUDIO
If The Brutalist is a monument to memory, then its sound is the wind that moves through the cracks. A24’s 4K release of Brady Corbet’s audacious and meditative film arrives with a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that is not so much aggressive as it is ghostly; an aural design that evokes less the thunder of history than its persistent murmur. There are echoes here; of A24’s other Holocaust-adjacent meditation, The Zone of Interest, whose sound design functioned like a low-grade fever. Corbet takes a similar approach, embedding a near-constant, almost subliminal pulse into the film’s atmosphere. As László Tóth steps ashore in postwar America, the viewer is not greeted with triumphant fanfare or sentimental strings, but rather a hum; an ambient reminder of what he has survived. It is the sound of nerves left raw, of breath held and never fully exhaled.
The surround mix does not draw attention to itself, and that is its quiet power. The rustle of architectural sketches, the crunch of gravel beneath factory boots, the distant clatter of tools, and the idle cough of aging cars; all of it sounds not recreated, but remembered. These textures emerge not as isolated effects but as parts of a larger sonic environment, one that feels lived-in and deeply psychological. The score, sweeping yet mournful, often enters like a shadow across the screen; never dominating, but always guiding. It underscores the film’s emotional architecture, binding its images together with a kind of invisible mortar. At moments of crescendo, it rises like a wave against the stoicism of the characters, offering a fleeting glimpse into the emotional terrain beneath their silence.
Dialogue is rendered with clarity and restraint. Even in scenes charged with emotion or conflict, the mix never overwhelms. Words arrive crisp, unobstructed, as if chiseled into stone. The multilingual tapestry of the film; Hungarian, English, and beyond; is respectfully handled, with English subtitles woven seamlessly into the frame. There is no dissonance between what we hear and what we read; both serve the larger architecture of understanding. In the end, what lingers is not a single sound but an impression: a sustained breath, a suppressed memory, a reverberation. The Brutalist does not demand to be heard. It listens; and, in doing so, invites the viewer to hear differently. Through its sound design, as with its architecture, the film becomes not just a story, but a space.
THE EXTRAS
- Audio Commentary – With Director of Photography Lol Crawley.
- The Architects of The Brutalist (25 Mins.)
- Six Art Cards
THE ULTIMATE WORD
Telling the story of Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth in the wake of the Holocaust, The Brutalist reflects on the postwar experience not through spectacle, but through slow revelation; how trauma lingers in design, in silence, in the impossible weight of reinvention. Corbet does not offer melodrama. He offers blueprints and ghosts. A24’s 4K presentation of the film honors that vision with quiet elegance. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is equally compelling. As for extras, the disc offers only a modest selection; an audio commentary and a brief production featurette. It is a slight offering for a film so substantial. And yet, The Brutalist needs little in the way of adornment. Its presence alone, preserved in this tactile, beautifully filmic edition, is its own statement. For cinephiles and collectors alike, this release is more than a physical object; it is a quiet cornerstone. A film about what we build from pain, arriving now in a form built to last.
