This 3-and-a-Half-Hour Epic Is Destined for Best Picture

In a womb of near-total darkness, a face materializes, upside down and distressed. The man, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), rises and, with his belongings in hand, struggles to make his way through the black, his path obstructed by countless other bodies shrouded in shadow.

Brief flashes of light through windows afford fleeting glimpses of him as he pushes forward in what appears to be the hull of a ship, the film’s helter-skelter handheld cinematography amplifying the chaos of this journey. Finally, he reaches a door that opens to let him pass into the brilliant light of day, his face ebullient as he gazes upon the Statue of Liberty, all as his unseen wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) reads a letter to him in narration, conveying her whereabouts and the condition of their young niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).

The Brutalist’s opening is a figurative birth for its Hungarian-born protagonist, and Brady Corbet’s masterful period piece—screening at this year’s New York Film Festival following celebrated turns at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, the latter of which awarded him its best director prize—is the story of his efforts to rebuild his life in America, one concrete slab at a time.

A harrowing 215-minute epic of perseverance, trauma, exploitation, and anti-Semitism, it’s a bracing examination of the scars of war, the difficulty of recovery, and the genius, madness, and self-destruction begat by calamity. The auteur’s third feature (after 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux), it marks Corbett as a filmmaker of titanic vision, as well as Brody as one of Hollywood’s most arresting actors.

Split into two parts plus an epilogue (not unlike Vox Lux), The Brutalist finds László exiting Ellis Island and boarding a train to Pennsylvania, touted by an archival promotional movie as the “Land of Decision” that’s at the forefront of modern industry. At the station, he’s met by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who welcomes him into his home and gives him a room in which to stay at his furniture store, where he makes custom items for well-paying clients.

Attila is gracious and affectionate, but his wife Audrey (Emma Laird) is less so, apparently due to the fact that László is Jewish and she is not—and has convinced her husband to convert to Catholicism and change his last name to Miller. Nonetheless, they get along for a time, and when Attila gets hired by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) to renovate his wealthy industrialist father’s study into a library, he takes László along, at which point the newly arrived immigrant is revealed to be an accomplished Bauhaus-trained architect who spearheaded numerous projects in his native Budapest.

László redesigns this space in a forward-thinking minimalist style, and though Harry’s dad Harrison (Guy Pearce) reacts badly to this surprise makeover, he eventually has a change of heart and tracks the architect down. By this point, Attila has thrown László out of his home, charging him with equally unjust professional and personal wrongs, and he’s working construction with a Black single father, Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), to whom he showed kindness on a soup kitchen line.

Since their prior encounter, Harrison has learned about László’s famed past, and he soon invites him to stay at his opulent country estate and begin devising plans for a vast, complex community center to be erected on a hill on his property. László is unsure about this endeavor and his arrogant employer, yet he has no other options, and the fact that Harrison’s lawyer is Jewish—and will help him find and bring Erzsébet and Zsófia to the States—convinces him to accept the offer.

To get into bed with Harrison and his angry son, however, is not simply to suffer the intolerant slights and humiliations that come with being a Jew, but to reconnect with a part of himself that he had imagined was gone. László’s revolutionary brutalist designs—defined by sharp angles, heavy concrete, dour hues, and sparse décor—speak to the nightmarishness of WWII as well as the burdensome torment of surviving it, their imposing monolithic coldness at once grandiose and grave-like.

They’re reflections of László’s soul, which is further corrupted by the heroin that he tries at a jazz club and to which he becomes addicted, complicating his work and his relationship with Erzsébet and Zsófia, who return in a wheelchair and mute, respectively, and in as much pain as the architect.

An operatic feast for the senses, The Brutalist (co-written by Mona Fastvold) is as formally ambitious as its main character, full of visual and narrative parallels (such as László and Erzsébet’s physical and emotional injuries), pointed recurring motifs (POV shots from the front of racing vehicles), and subtly breathtaking close-ups and single takes that twist, swing, and swoop alongside László and company.

Whether he’s lingering an extra two seconds on a crowded dance floor after the soundtrack has given way to silence, creating a sense of time, space, and mood via sharply edited still-image montages, or creating tension with Daniel Blumberg’s lavish and rousing score, Corbet captures the scope and scale of László’s hunger, audacity and anguish in big, bold strokes and with gentle, affecting flourishes.

László’s new beginning is echoed by radio reports of the creation of the State of Israel, to which Zsófia and her husband eventually relocate, and even when the center’s completion appears doomed, the architect proves incapable of letting go of his dream. Alas, the more he strives to finish what he began, the more he loses himself and, worse, opens himself up to victimization at the hands of his callous and abusive benefactors.

Sex and agony are intertwined for László and Erzsébet, while rape and cruelty are the stock and trade of those who purport to be their compatriots. If The Brutalist’s late plot developments spell this out a tad too directly, the film remains a furious, sorrowful portrait of triumph and tragedy, all of it building to a coda in which László’s work is ably summed up by a retrospective’s title, “The Presence of the Past.”

Corbett crafts The Brutalist as a monument to misery that’s not unlike those fashioned by László, and at its center is Brody, who inhabits the architect with haunted, poignant humanity.

His László is a man who’s breaking apart because he refuses to bend, and his tale is one of searching for life by courting death, and Brody brilliantly captures the irreconcilable wars going on inside his head and his heart through kind eyes and sly smiles that often give way to stern grimaces and ferocious screams. In terms of range and depth, it’s his finest work since his turn in The Pianist—and likely to earn him the same sort of effusive acclaim.