This article appeared in the September 27, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

Grief and loss are both overpowering and elusive, impossible to examine directly but always present for the stricken, like a sunspot on the edge of one’s vision. We struggle to confront and describe it in detail, precisely because it is so daunting and so massive an obstacle. Writing about F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) in his book The Material Ghost, Gilberto Perez quotes Heidegger: “Death is something that stands before us—something impending.”

Brady Corbet’s new film The Brutalist is the kind of movie that seems to yearn for a Heidegger quote. Though it fancies itself an all-encompassing postmodern tragedy about the essential corruption of the American soul (among the countless themes it gestures at before quickly moving on), The Brutalist is, if nothing else, a film about grief—over the loss of country, family, and self. This pervading sense of mourning is the most coherent thing about this largely unfocused and self-important movie, communicated almost entirely via the performances of actors Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, who embody two very different, and very grief-stricken men. 

The film begins with a title card announcing an “Overture”—a nod toward a symphonic structure that never manifests. Following a brief, impressionistic scene of a woman being interrogated in a gray room, the setting shifts to the darkness of a ship’s hold. Brody, as the titular architect László Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor, is roughly awakened by an equally disheveled passenger. The two scramble upward through layers of Dickensian squalor until they reach the deck, where they embrace at the sight of the Statue of Liberty. This sequence, which I guess is a reference to the Ellis Island arrival scene in The Godfather Part II (1974), is shot with a crazily spinning camera, like a sped-up outtake from La Région centrale (1971). Corbet uses the same technique in the shock ending of his debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), and in his baffling Columbine-massacre/pop-star mash-up Vox Lux (2018). What that crazy camerawork is trying to say in those older films, I couldn’t tell you, except that maybe shit is about to get wild. In The Brutalist, the point seems to be that America is actually not a land of liberty, but rather a den of rapacious capitalist iniquity—a reading that, without giving too much away, very much tracks with what’s to come.

After grabbing a bus to Philadelphia, László sets up shop with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who has married a shiksa named Audrey and changed his name to Miller, in an effort to assimilate. Attila owns a custom-furniture store, and, as it turns out, László trained at the Bauhaus and later designed the Budapest Library, among other internationally recognized masterpieces of modernist architecture. While sleeping on a cot in the storeroom and waiting in a breadline for his food, László throws together some chic Herman Miller–style office sets, offering his cousin access to a more exclusive clientele. One of these new customers is a pale, smarmy rich kid looking to surprise his industrialist father, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Pearce), with a renovated personal library. One thing leads to another, and eventually, Harrison offers László a job designing a monumental building—a cultural center—in tribute to his late mother. All the while, László yearns for his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who remains overseas thanks to bureaucratic red tape. 

The film, which runs nearly four hours, is packed with incidental cultural details and historical references, including several interludes that feature archival footage and radio broadcasts on the end of the Second World War, the dangers of heroin addiction, and the glory of the Pennsylvania steel industry. These moments underscore a tendency in Corbet’s work to place his characters in or near historically significant situations, Forrest Gump–like, as if mere proximity can yield some profound insight into the individual’s role in the making of the world. The film can feel at times like a collection of references looking for a referent, from the Presidential–Confederate General portmanteau of “Harrison Lee Van Buren” to the too-obvious play on words of the title itself. And for all its insistence on period detail, The Brutalist is quite lazy about maintaining historical accuracy. Case in point: in the mid-’50s, László acquires a heroin habit while hanging out at jazz clubs and listening to hard bop that mysteriously becomes skronking free jazz after he shoots up. I guess that’s how Ornette Coleman came up with the idea?

In its second half, the film becomes more explicit about the costs of sublimation, as László channels his grief into his Quixotic design, pushing away his family as he seeks to annihilate himself in his art. But again, Corbet can’t seem to help himself, constantly diverting the story from this track, like a kitten jumping after a laser pointer. He shifts the focus to Erzsébet—whom Jones plays with a heavy accent, like a cross between Katerina Golubeva in Pola X (1999) and Dr. Strangelove—as she struggles to reconnect with her broken husband, and possibly considers an affair with Harrison, though this hint of a storyline comes to nothing, like many of the film’s narrative and thematic feints.

Even The Brutalist’s attempts to articulate grander themes like anti-Semitism and the plight of the Jewish diaspora are half-baked. In addition to a randomly inserted radio snippet announcing the establishment of the State of Israel, the film’s latter half features a didactic and confusing scene in which László and Erzsébet’s niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), declares that she’s immigrating to Israel with her husband. László blurts out a defense of the diaspora—“Are we not Jews?”—while the family clinks spoons in their soup bowls. There is no further elaboration or exploration of how these characters think or feel about their state of exile until the film’s epilogue, which involves a retrospective of László’s work at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale—which bore the silly, and very real, title The Presence of the Past, which is emphasized on screen. 20 years have elapsed since we last saw him, dark-haired and middle-aged, and László is now a geriatric shell of himself, incapable of speech. The scene’s great reveal, culminating the film’s 215 minutes, is that his work is steeped in his experience of the Holocaust. The past, apparently, is present. 

But before that there’s a climactic act of violence, perpetrated on László, the pure artist and aesthete, by Harrison, the representative of capitalist corruption. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say the most obvious metaphorical description of their relationship is made viscerally real in a moment that is shocking less for its content than for its narrative incoherence. It is barely mentioned again, and then only as a device to propel the story to its conclusion, rather than a serious attempt to describe the codependency—financial, professional, and emotional—between the artist and his patron. But wherever The Brutalist fails, whether in coherence or substance, the two lead actors—Brody grounded and mournful, while Pearce is working in a heightened, mannerist register—offer an emotional through line. 

Brody’s face droops as only his can, occasionally showing flashes of pain through an otherwise persistent fog of depression. As he finds a creative outlet, he replaces depression with anger, his jaw clenched and his tone increasingly bitter. Pearce’s Harrison is, at first, a garrulous and frivolous person, relying on his wealth to bully those around him. Nevertheless, the actor’s performance implies dark undercurrents and insecurity, as well as an animal ferocity and reliance on instinct that is at odds with Brody’s cold, thoughtful, and ruminative architect. Harrison’s grief at the loss of the woman he calls “mother”—who was not, he reveals at one point, his birth mother—seeps out of Pearce’s rictus-like smile and bubbling banter over the course of the film. While The Brutalist futilely reaches for metaphor, it is, thanks to Brody and Pearce, at least successful on the order of sentiment: as a vision of two men, interred in their sorrow, pushing each other deeper into isolation.