“The Brutalist” ending explained: Director Brady Corbet reflects on building that transformative epilogue

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Brutalist.

If you left The Brutalist scratching your head, rest assured — you're not alone.

The 3.5-hour architectural epic ends with a pair of intentionally puzzling scenes — one that wraps up the film's main midcentury timeline in the late 1950s, and another that brings the characters into the 1980s.

In the sequence that ends the film's supersized second part (subtitled "The Hard Core of Beauty"), Erzsébet Tóth (Felicity Jones) stumbles into the mansion of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and tells his dinner guests that he raped her husband, architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody).

Van Buren denies Erzsébet's accusation (which is shown as true in a prior sequence) and slips out of the house as his guests grow increasingly uncomfortable. Clearly shaken by the confrontation, Van Buren's son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), rushes into László's moonlit concrete monument to Harrison's late mother, only to find that his father has vanished without a trace.

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Then, in the 1980-set epilogue (subtitled "The First Architecture Biennale"), László is honored with a career retrospective in Venice. Since the aged architect himself appears to have limited verbal abilities, his niece, Zsófia — previously played by Raffey Cassidy, but now portrayed by Ariane Labed in the epilogue — addresses the crowd on his behalf.

In her remarks, Zsófia — who immigrated to Israel earlier in the film — states that her uncle's mysterious monument was a replica of a structure that imprisoned him in a German concentration camp during the war, save for a single detail: extended ceilings. Zsófia's explanation imbues a new poignance and weight to the project at the center of the film, and she finishes her speech with a very conclusive statement: "No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey."

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But are Zsófia's remarks intended to be taken at face value, or are they merely one person's interpretation of László's work and life? Does Zsófia actually have special access to her uncle's definitive truth, or is she giving the final word on a narrative she doesn't fully understand?

Director and co-writer Brady Corbet offers his two cents. "Well, it's both," he tells Entertainment Weekly. "The thing about a piece of public art, and this goes for architecture and cinema alike, is that no one is necessarily right. No one is necessarily wrong. So there's themes that I have always been happy to unpack for people to the best of my ability, but I never ever undressed them completely because for me, then the film's sort of magic in the conversation around them ceases to exist. I mean, what a bummer would it be for David Lynch to tell you what every single scene in Lost Highway means."

Brody suggests that Zsófia's speech contains some elements of truth. "Keeping the ceiling height was integral to the storytelling of what the symbolism of this building meant to him and to the spiritual aspect of looking, the soaring ceilings, looking for some kind of inspiration from above or reprieve from all of the rest," the actor explains. "I think it's so eloquent, so beautiful."

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Corbet elaborates on his priorities. "My interests are historical. They are not political," he says. "Of course, I'm familiar with the argument that everything is political, and I get that, but my approach to making films on history — it's always outside of politics, as Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux were as well."

The filmmaker notes that there's an earlier scene that might help viewers make sense of the film's conclusion. "Adrien has a monologue about the cycle of trauma during his long back-and-forth with Guy Pearce at the Christmas party," he says. "I think that all of the answers that people are looking for are in there."

That being said, Corbet doesn't want to show his hand too clearly. "At the end of the day, I believe that a work of art is the one safe space to be able to express and question and provoke curiosity and evoke various themes," he says. "That's something that I think we all need to encourage, because otherwise people are going to be too scared to say or do anything at all, and we're going to end up with absolutely nothing, or we're going to end up with a bunch of content that's actually not wrestling with any difficult themes because people are too frightened of it. And so I really just think that people need to encourage artists to explore whatever it is that they feel like exploring — without having to apologize for it."

The Brutalist is now playing in theaters.

Reporting by Christian Holub

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly