The Brutalist review: an awe-inspiring epic that’s one of 2024’s best movies

The Brutalist is a big film with big questions and a gargantuan 215-minute runtime to match the size and scope of its ambition. It is a drama with characters who feel like they could have been pulled straight out of the pages of a Great American Novel, and it is set in a post-WWII period of America that it so lovingly recreates that you fall easily and seamlessly into its formalistic, dreamlike embrace. It openly invites comparisons to past, iconic American epics like The Godfather, Heaven’s Gate, The Master, and There Will Be Blood, despite being made for considerably less money than all of those movies.

It is a film covered in the fingerprints of auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson, whose past explorations of the oppressiveness of certain social, economic, and industrial systems seem to have not just influenced The Brutalist, but guided its entire creation. Some will argue that its debt to its spiritual predecessors is too obvious and that its attempts to recreate the aesthetic and look of other, similarly ambitious epics are too self-conscious. But the self-conscious nature of The Brutalist‘s cinematic endeavor is the point. It is a film that wants to root viewers in a visual language they know and yet may have forgotten, especially during a time when Hollywood’s interest in expansive adult dramas like those that inspired The Brutalist seems to be at an all-time low.

It’s a big movie about the value and the cost of pursuing big artistic visions. Its hero is an immigrant whose dreams are too large for a man with so little existing social and economic standing to achieve on his own. In order to bring them to life, he must concede a portion of himself and his life. Such is the case in a world where big dreams so often require more money than their dreamers themselves possess.

The Brutalist begins where so many other immigrant stories before it have: within the dark, cramped confines of a creaking metal boat. As the ship’s horns blow, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, struggles to climb his way out of its pitch-black lower quarters and into the light of its upper deck. When he eventually does, he looks up to see the Statue of Liberty towering over him in a handheld camera pan masterfully executed by director Brady Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley that initially captures the American symbol — a welcome to all immigrants — crooked and upside down. This moment, striking enough to provoke a shocked gasp in the theater, is as close to a mission statement as The Brutalist comes, a warning that the dreams we pursue more often than not turn out different’y than we imagined them to be.

The Brutalist follows László as he makes his way from New York to Philadelphia to live with his cousin, Attila (Kraven‘s Alessandro Nivola), who owns a fledgling furniture store with his wife, Audrey (Emma Laird). In the first of many moments in which László’s conception of America is marred, he is understandably left aghast when he discovers the lengths Attila has gone to cover up his Jewish identity, as well how casually his cousin seems to have accepted his perceived need to do so. László nonetheless begins working for Attila and, before long, the two men are commissioned by Harry Lee Van Buren (a suitably arrogant Joe Alwyn) to renovate the dusty personal library of his wealthy industrialist father, Harrison (Guy Pearce).

Despite its 3-plus-hour runtime, The Brutalist cruises through its first hour at a disarming speed. Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold’s screenplay does a remarkable job of keying viewers into not only László’s immigrant journey, but also his talent. You sit back and wait in anxious anticipation for the moment when someone will discover his potential. That moment comes when Harrison seeks out László to apologize for his initial, negative reaction to his and Attila’s renovation and also ask him about his work in Europe before the war. As he looks upon images of the buildings that he designed before he was deemed “undesirable” by the Nazis, László is brought to tears. Harrison, whose curiosity is further piqued by László’s emotional reaction, quickly ingratiates the brutalist architect into his high-society circles and commissions him to design a new building in rural Pennsylvania.

The job quickly consumes László’s every waking moment, even when his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), whom he was forcibly separated from by the Nazis, emigrates from Europe and joins him in the States. In his partnership with Harrison, László sees a chance to create another building that won’t just — as he remarks during one key conversation in The Brutalist‘s first act — defy the erosion of time and politics, but also stand as a monument to the pain that he and his people suffered during the Holocaust. In order to bring this vision to life, though, he must navigate Harrison’s many mood swings and reminders of the financial control he holds over László and his latest dream. The Brutalist, notably, doesn’t frame this conflict so much as a There Will Be Blood-esque battle of wills as it does another process that an immigrant artist like László must simply endure and survive.

The Brutalist treats Harrison’s manipulation and long-unaddressed abuse of László with a fatalistic touch that, unlike the heroin László takes to cope with the pain of an injury he suffered during his boat trip to America, doesn’t numb you to the film’s heart-wrenching power. Instead, it only envelopes you further in your sympathy for László and Erzsébet, two people whose past traumas, as Jones and Brody both convey in different, thorny ways, have affected them on a physical, bone-deep level. Opposite his two co-stars, Pearce nearly runs away with The Brutalist, playing Harrison at first with such an astonishing level of self-confidence that you are, for a time at least, swept up in his charm. The full extent of his desire to control László is finally revealed in The Brutalist‘s best and most sickening sequence — a brief trip to the mountains of Italy that hauntingly captures the difference between those who wish to respect and honor the beauty of the world and those who wish to merely own it themselves.

As a filmmaker, Corbet has never been one to shy away from a big swing. His two previous features, 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux, are proof of that. Never before, though, has Corbet managed to combine his always admirable artistic ambitions and his cynical, sometimes limiting perspective as successfully as he does in The Brutalist. It is a film that, like Vox Lux, is made with a level of technical skill that is impossible to deny. In addition to Corbet’s steady, calculated direction and Crawley’s atmospheric, surreal cinematography, The Brutalist also benefits greatly from composer Daniel Blumberg’s percussive score, which chugs assuredly along at all times, propelling the film forward and imbuing it with swells of emotion and grandeur that make the titanic scope of its story all the more effective.

Here, Corbet has captured a kind of frustrated hopelessness that feels as specific to its characters and their story as it does timeless. “They do not want us here!” László screams at Erzsébet during one climactic argument, assuaging her of her belief that they’ll ever truly be welcomed in America. The problem is that they were not wanted in Europe, either. Erzsébet does her best to hold on to her dream of Israel as a potential haven for her and László, but what The Brutalist taps into with devastating precision is the sense that there isn’t anywhere any of us can go to feel valued and safe. That is a dark thought, but one that has felt true for decades and continues to.

Even if this is a world that does not want our ideas, though, that does that mean we must give up on them. There are still ways to bring even the grandest of our dreams into being. The Brutalist, a film that took six years to make, is proof of that. The question we must all ask ourselves, and which The Brutalist does, is how much pain we are willing to endure to make our dreams reality. At what point does the cost overtake the reward? How much of a victory, in other words, is creation alone?

The Brutalist opens in select theaters Friday, December 20.