‘The Brutalist’ review: an unmissable giant of a film that deserves all the Oscars

We’ll save you a google during the intermission: architect László Tóth isn’t a real person. Use those 15 minutes to get yourself together instead – you’re gonna need it.

It’s all too easy to assume you’re watching a true story because everything about The Brutalist feels genuine. A three hour and thirty minute biopic about art, history, money, sex, trauma and concrete, it’s heavyweight in every sense: a monument to its own greatness that stands a good distance from anything else you’re likely to see at the cinema this year.

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And it’s in the cinema where The Brutalist thrives – gorgeously shot on 70mm VistaVision stock to hit you with shock and awe from the opening scene. Here we see Holocaust survivor László (Adrien Brody) stumble from the depths of a passenger ship in the 1940s to see The Statue Of Liberty for the first time; upside down, shaky and deafened with brass. Leaving his wife and niece (Felicity Jones and Raffey Cassidy) behind in war-torn Hungary, László is a (fictional, need we remind you) famous architect looking for purpose in the new world, finding instead a mattress in the stockroom of his cousin’s Philadelphia furniture store.

A chance commission brings the millionaire Van Burens into the picture – stuck-up son Harry (Joe Alwyn) and bullish patriarch Harrison (Guy Pearce) – who see something to use and abuse in László. An hour or so into the film finds László hired to build a vanity project that ends up becoming his life’s great obsession; a building that represents everything he left behind in Europe and all that he hopes to discover in America. It’s salvation, grief, art, beauty and pain in one – and it ends up tearing everyone apart.

Neatly divided into two hefty 100-minute chapters, The Brutalist is a giant of a film even though it keeps its focus as tight as possible. Sharing a lot of DNA with Oppenheimer and There Will Be Blood, director Brady Corbet’s magnum opus is comprised of fine brush strokes on a big canvas – a story of personal obsession that keeps all the other Big Themes riding in the background. Pushing his camera in uncomfortably close, Corbet avoids anything wide or grand, lingering on small details and sometimes skipping over crucial reveals and conversations entirely. Much like László’s building, the film is a small room with a very, very high ceiling. Cramped and lofty at the same time, often unsubtle, it forces you to keep looking up.

Brody’s electrifying central performance will get all the attention over the coming award season, but Pearce deserves almost as much credit – both actors arguably doing the best work of their careers here. But then there’s Daniel Blumberg’s jagged steam-roller of a score; Dávid Jancsó’s patient editing skills; Lol Crawley’s savage, biting cinematography and Corbet’s self-assured direction – all now surely front-runners to clean up at the Oscars.

But if it does win anything, The Brutalist will still probably feel like the least plausible Best Picture we’ve had in years. An epic about the literal building blocks of America, sure, and a big historical immigrant story, absolutely, it is deliberately never an easy watch. The unholy union of art and money isn’t meant to be palatable, and obsession never looks pretty if it’s done properly.

The Brutalist earns its title even when it’s being occasionally hilarious and the running time isn’t the only thing about it that will leave you emotionally wiped out by the finale. But even though Corbet probably does a bit too much to make his film come across as a masterpiece, it’s impossible not to think it also actually is.

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