My wife and I sought refuge
from Friday afternoon’s rain by immersing ourselves within the imagined
world of a great movie—The Brutalist. Directed by Brady
Corbet, the film is hailed by many critics as a work of towering ambition, worthy of the highest
industry awards. Indeed, some even deem it a masterpiece. Given its title, subject
matter, and the hype surrounding it, I had to see it.
As someone who has lived the life of an architect, I brought high hopes that The Brutalist would provide the kind of cinematic experience I’ve long desired—one that fully embraces the transformative power of visionary design and conveys its profound impact on both creator and society. While The Brutalist is richly composed and thematically dense, it ultimately left me unfulfilled. It isn’t a film about architecture but rather one about the trauma and compromises of its protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth.(1) At best, architecture functions as a metaphor rather than a subject. In doing so, I think Corbet missed an opportunity to explore why architecture—specifically Brutalism—matters.
The film charts the rise and fall of the fictional Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who immigrates to America and is commissioned by wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren to design a grand, imposing project. While The Brutalist touches on themes of artistic integrity, patronage, and the weight of history, it never truly explores why László is so devoted to Brutalism or what drives his stylistic choices beyond vague notions of resilience and monumentality. The film barely reveals the details of his designs, let alone the creative process behind them. There's little sense of how his ideas evolve, what his influences are, or how his work engages with the architectural discourse of the time. Corbet frames László’s work more as an externalization of his inner turmoil than as a deeply considered architectural philosophy. I do suppose we can see the raw, exposed concrete he designs with as a representation of his resilience and the weight of his past or as the emotional barrier he erects to protect himself from further pain.
While undoubtedly Oscar-worthy, Adrien Brody’s portrayal of László Tóth as a deeply principled but emotionally fractured and damaged man veers into the same tortured genius archetype he embodied in The Pianist. There, his character’s suffering was visceral, grounded in a historical reality that needed no embellishment. In The Brutalist, however, the film’s artistic affectations distanced me from Tóth’s pain rather than drawing me into it. Additionally, Felicity Jones, as László’s wife Erzsébet, provided an emotional anchor, but her character’s development was limited. Guy Pearce’s Van Buren, while compelling, remained enigmatic in ways that sometimes felt underwritten rather than deliberate.
For a film that spans decades and continents, The Brutalist struggles with pacing. Despite its three-and-a-half-hour runtime (including a 15-minute intermission), I found key transitions jarringly abrupt. László’s arrival in America and subsequent ascent in Van Buren’s orbit happen with little sense of progression—he goes from immigrant to major commission without much attention to his professional evolution. Later, the film’s climax feels similarly rushed, offering only a cryptic glimpse of his final project. Corbet’s decision to leave the exact nature of Tóth’s ultimate work open to interpretation might be an artistic choice, but it felt less like deliberate ambiguity and more like an avoidance of fully engaging with architecture as a discipline.
In this regard, The Brutalist reminds me of another film that ostensibly placed architecture at its thematic core—Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Both films are burdened by their own ambitions, using architecture as a narrative vessel rather than a fully realized subject. When I reviewed Megalopolis, I noted its thematic parallels to The Fountainhead: while Ayn Rand’s novel champions individualism and objectivism, Coppola’s film critiques the dangers of unchecked ambition and the ethical complexities of utopian idealism. With The Brutalist, the Fountainhead comparison also applies, but in a different way—Corbet’s film is less about ideology and more about the personal costs of creation.
Despite my reservations, I can't deny The Brutalist's craftsmanship. The production design is impressive in its attention to period details, such as the costuming and depictions of the society forces that shaped and constrained László’s life. The use of real locations, like the marble quarries in Carrara, Italy, adds authenticity. The cinematography, shot in VistaVision (a large format last used on a major motion picture in 1961) is likewise evocative, though at times its desaturated dreariness felt at odds with the grandeur the film seems to aspire to.
I left The Brutalist feeling much as I did after watching Megalopolis—impressed by its ambition but frustrated by its execution. I still long for a film that truly captures the power of architecture as an art form, one that illuminates why it matters, how it shapes us, and what drives those who dedicate their lives to it. The Brutalist acknowledges architecture’s emotional and symbolic weight, but it stops short of truly engaging with it. In the end, it is a film about an architect, not a film about architecture. And for a work that promised to be steeped in the language of design, that feels like a missed opportunity.
