The Brutalist

Based on Wikipedia: The Brutalist

A Monument Built From Trauma

Here is a film that asks a dangerous question: What if the buildings we construct are really just solidified memories? What if concrete and steel and marble could hold grief the way a body holds scars?

The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet and released in late 2024, runs three and a half hours. It demands that length. The story it tells—of a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to America, only to discover that trauma doesn't respect borders—cannot be rushed. Like the brutalist architecture that gives the film its name, it is massive, uncompromising, and strangely beautiful.

Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a man trained at the Bauhaus—that legendary German art school that revolutionized design in the early twentieth century before the Nazis shut it down. When we first see him, his ship is entering New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty rises into view. For millions of immigrants over generations, this moment represented hope, freedom, the chance to begin again.

The film spends nearly three hours showing us how complicated that promise actually is.

The Long Shadow of 1947

László arrives in Philadelphia in 1947, two years after the war's end. He's been separated from his wife Erzsébet and his orphaned niece Zsófia, though he learns they're alive and stuck in Europe. Small mercies.

He stays with his cousin Attila, who has already performed the quiet surgery of assimilation. Attila has anglicized his name. He's converted to Catholicism. He runs a furniture business. He has become, in the American phrase, a regular guy.

László cannot become a regular guy. He is too brilliant for that, and too broken.

When a wealthy man named Harry Lee Van Buren hires László and Attila to secretly renovate his father's library as a surprise, László applies his Bauhaus training and creates something extraordinary. The problem is that Harrison Lee Van Buren—the father, a wealthy industrialist—doesn't want extraordinary. He wants what he had. He fires both men and refuses to pay.

Attila blames László. Their relationship shatters. László, homeless again in a country that was supposed to save him, descends into heroin addiction.

What Brutalism Actually Means

Before we go further, it's worth understanding what brutalist architecture actually is, because the word sounds like it describes violence when it really describes honesty.

The term comes from the French phrase béton brut, meaning "raw concrete." Brutalist buildings emerged after World War II, particularly in Europe and later America, and they share certain characteristics: exposed concrete, massive geometric forms, visible structural elements. They don't hide what they're made of. They don't apologize for taking up space.

Critics have called brutalist buildings ugly, oppressive, inhumane. Defenders argue they're democratic—built from cheap materials, designed for public use, refusing to disguise their construction with ornament or pretension. A brutalist building says: this is what I am. This is what I'm made of. Take it or leave it.

You can see why Corbet chose this style for a film about a Holocaust survivor. The architecture becomes metaphor. László cannot hide what he's made of either.

The Patron and the Parasite

Three years after being fired, László is loading coal. He lives in charity housing with his friend Gordon, an African-American single father. Then Harrison Van Buren reappears.

It turns out that surprise library renovation became famous in architectural circles. People admired it. Harrison has discovered that his furniture store laborer was actually a celebrated architect in Europe before the war destroyed everything.

Harrison pays the money he owed. He invites László to a party. He commissions a grand project: The Van Buren Institute, a community center with a library, theater, gymnasium, and chapel, built in tribute to Harrison's late mother.

This sounds like redemption. It isn't.

The relationship between patron and artist is ancient and complicated. The Medicis funded Michelangelo but also controlled him. The Church commissioned Bernini but dictated his subjects. Every great building exists because someone with money agreed to pay for someone else's vision—and that agreement always comes with strings.

Harrison Van Buren wants to own more than a building. He wants to own László's genius. And beneath his patronage lies something darker: an envy that will eventually curdle into violence.

The Women Who Survive

In 1953, László finally reunites with Erzsébet and Zsófia. The film doesn't flinch from showing what survival costs.

Erzsébet, played by Felicity Jones, now uses a wheelchair full-time. Osteoporosis, likely worsened by malnutrition during the war, has stolen her mobility. Zsófia has stopped speaking entirely—a psychological wound so deep it closed her throat.

These women survived Dachau. László survived Buchenwald. The film never shows us the camps directly. It doesn't need to. The camps live in the characters' bodies, in their silences, in the spaces between what they say and what they mean.

Erzsébet becomes a journalist. Zsófia eventually recovers her voice and marries. These are triumphs, hard-won and precious. But the film understands that recovery isn't linear and survival isn't the same as healing.

The Violence Underneath

There's a scene late in the film that audiences have found difficult to watch. László and Harrison travel to Carrara, Italy, to purchase marble for the institute. Carrara has been the source of the world's finest marble for two thousand years—Michelangelo's David came from those quarries, as did countless Roman monuments.

There, Harrison rapes László.

During the assault, he calls László a societal leech. He says László's people—meaning Jews—invite their own persecution.

The scene is devastating precisely because it shatters any remaining illusion that Harrison's patronage was generous. It reveals what was always true: Harrison saw László not as an artist to support but as a possession to use. The beautiful building rising in Pennsylvania has always been, at its foundation, an exercise in domination.

László begins to unravel. He fires his friend Gordon in a moment of misplaced rage. He gives Erzsébet heroin to soothe her pain and nearly kills her. He tells his wife what happened. Eventually, Erzsébet confronts Harrison directly, calling him a rapist in front of his family and associates.

The house of cards collapses. But the building—that massive concrete monument—continues to rise.

The Long View

The film's epilogue jumps to 1980. Twenty-two years have passed. The Van Buren Institute was finally completed in 1973, after construction delays, legal battles, and the terrible events we've witnessed.

Erzsébet has died. László, now elderly and in a wheelchair himself, attends a retrospective of his work at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. This is real, by the way—the Venice Biennale of Architecture was founded in 1980 and remains one of the most prestigious events in the field.

Zsófia gives a speech. What she reveals changes everything.

She tells the assembled audience that her uncle designed spaces within the Van Buren Institute to resemble the concentration camps—Buchenwald and Dachau. The building that appears to be a community center, a place of culture and gathering, secretly contains the architecture of genocide embedded in its bones.

This is, she implies, how László processed his trauma. He built a monument that remembers while pretending to forget.

She ends with a phrase László used to tell her when she was a struggling young mother: "No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey."

That line inverts a cliché so completely it becomes profound. We're told constantly that the journey matters more than the destination. László—who journeyed through hell—disagrees.

The Making of a Monument

The production of The Brutalist itself became an exercise in endurance, mirroring its subject matter in unexpected ways.

Corbet announced the project in September 2018, shortly after completing his second feature, Vox Lux. He co-wrote the screenplay with his partner Mona Fastvold, with whom he'd collaborated on his previous films. The original cast included Joel Edgerton and Marion Cotillard as László and Erzsébet, with Mark Rylance as the wealthy patron.

Then the world intervened.

COVID-19 postponed filming that had been scheduled for December 2020. The war in Ukraine caused further delays. Several members of the cast and crew experienced pregnancies and deaths in their families. By the time principal photography finally began in March 2023, the cast had entirely changed. Adrien Brody replaced Edgerton. Felicity Jones replaced Cotillard. Guy Pearce took over the role of Harrison Van Buren.

Corbet shot the film in Hungary, which doubled for 1950s Pennsylvania. Budapest and its surrounding countryside stood in for Philadelphia, while the Andrássy Castle in Tóalmás became the Van Buren mansion. The production spent time in Carrara, filming in the marble quarries in unexpected thick fog that lent the scenes an otherworldly quality.

Principal photography wrapped after just thirty-four days.

Seeing Through Vintage Eyes

One of the film's most striking technical choices involves VistaVision, a film format developed in the 1950s and rarely used since.

Standard 35 millimeter film runs vertically through a camera. VistaVision runs horizontally, using more of the film stock and creating a larger, sharper image. Paramount developed the format in 1954 to compete with widescreen processes like CinemaScope, and for a few years, it produced some of the most visually stunning films of the era—Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and North by Northwest among them.

Then television changed the industry, budgets tightened, and the format faded away.

Corbet and his director of photography, Lol Crawley, revived it for The Brutalist partly because they wanted to capture architecture without distorting wide-angle lenses, and partly because, as Corbet explained, "the best way to access the 1950s was to shoot on something that was engineered in that same decade."

The film was also released in 70 millimeter prints for certain theatrical showings, a format that matches VistaVision's frame height and shows the images at their intended scale. If you've never seen a 70 millimeter print projected, it's worth seeking out—the resolution and depth exceed anything digital can currently achieve.

The Architect Who Never Existed

László Tóth is fictional, but he's composed of real people.

Corbet and Fastvold drew inspiration from several actual architects: Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian who studied at the Bauhaus and later designed buildings like the Whitney Museum in New York; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German-American architect whose "less is more" philosophy defined mid-century modernism; Louis Kahn, whose brutalist buildings include the Salk Institute in California and the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh; and Ernő Goldfinger, a Hungarian-born British architect whose concrete towers became both celebrated and controversial.

During research, Corbet and Fastvold consulted Jean-Louis Cohen, an architectural historian who noted something important: no actual architect emerged from the concentration camps to have a career like László's. The character is a composite, an imagining of a life that could have existed but didn't.

This matters because the film isn't a biography. It's something more universal—a meditation on what happens when genius meets trauma, when creativity confronts destruction, when someone tries to build a future from the rubble of an unbearable past.

Recognition and Legacy

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024. Corbet won the Silver Lion for Best Direction. Reviews were rapturous—critics praised the film's ambition, its performances, and its visual grandeur.

At the Academy Awards in 2025, The Brutalist earned ten nominations, including Best Picture. It won three: Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Actor for Adrien Brody. The Golden Globes awarded it Best Motion Picture in the Drama category. The American Film Institute named it one of the top ten films of 2024.

Against a budget of nine and a half million dollars—modest by contemporary standards—it earned over fifty million worldwide. This isn't blockbuster money, but for a three-and-a-half-hour period drama about architecture and trauma, it represents a remarkable success.

What Remains

Buildings outlast their builders. This is both their power and their tragedy.

The Van Buren Institute, as imagined in the film, stands as a monument to many things: Harrison's mother, Harrison's ego, László's genius, László's suffering. It contains multitudes, including horrors invisible to most visitors. Only someone who knows what to look for—who has been told the secret—can see Buchenwald and Dachau hidden in the chapel, the gymnasium, the library.

Corbet dedicated the film to Scott Walker, the experimental musician who scored his previous films and who died in 2019. Walker's music—dense, challenging, emotionally devastating—would have suited this material perfectly. In his absence, Daniel Blumberg composed a score that earned its Oscar.

The film asks what we build from our worst experiences. Whether we can transform suffering into something lasting. Whether America ever really welcomed the huddled masses or merely tolerated them until finding reason not to.

These are not comfortable questions. The Brutalist is not a comfortable film.

But then, brutalist buildings were never meant to be comfortable either. They were meant to be honest. They were meant to show us what they're made of and let us decide what that means.

László Tóth, fictional architect, built a community center that secretly memorializes genocide. Brady Corbet, actual director, built a film that refuses to let us forget what refusing to forget actually costs.

It is the destination, not the journey. What we build in the end is what remains.