The Brutalist Review: An Immigrant Epic Built to the Scale of Its Ambition

Scale as statement

They do not make films like this anymore, which is exactly Brady Corbet’s point. Shot in VistaVision, running past three and a half hours with an intermission, The Brutalist announces itself as an old-fashioned epic and then fills that vast frame with an unfashionably bleak thesis: that the American dream is a transaction, and the artist-immigrant is the party who pays. The grandeur is not nostalgia; it is argument.

Architecture as autobiography

The story of a Hungarian-Jewish architect rebuilding his genius under a wealthy industrialist’s patronage becomes a parable about the ownership of vision — who funds art, who controls it, whose name goes on the building. Corbet films the construction of a monument as the slow demolition of a man, and the concrete brutalism of the title is both the hero’s aesthetic and the film’s own severe, imposing form.

Brody’s monument

Adrien Brody gives a career-crowning performance as a man whose brilliance is both his salvation and the lever by which he is exploited. Opposite him, Guy Pearce’s industrialist is charm masking contempt — patronage as a form of ownership. Their relationship is the film’s engine, a study of how power flatters and then consumes.

The overreach

A film this large invites the charge of grasping, and The Brutalist does not entirely escape it; its final movement lunges for a thesis its patient earlier hours had more powerfully implied. But the ambition is the substance — better a film that reaches too far than one content to reach nowhere.

Verdict

The Brutalist is a monumental, morally serious epic — the rare contemporary film with the scale and nerve of the classics it evokes. Flawed in its reach, unforgettable in its power.