The Brutalist review: Adrien Brody is tremendous as a visionary architect

The Brutalist is a vast and absorbing period piece about a fictional 20th-century draughtsman, Laszlo Toth. Photo / IMDB

REVIEW

Brady Corbet’s towering third feature is a state-of-the-US historical epic with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama.

In 1998, it was meteors. In 2003 and 2004, computer-animated fish. Whether through common inspiration or commercial rivalry, films with matching themes sometimes come along in pairs. And in 2024, cinema really seems to have a thing for visionary architects.

Mere months after the premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in Cannes, Venice has served up The Brutalist - a splurgily vast and absorbing period piece about a fictional 20th-century draughtsman, Adrien Brody’s Laszlo Toth, who embarks on the sort of grand design that would make Kevin McCloud wake up with a shriek.

The Brutalist spans two continents and three decades. Photo / IMDB

Directed by 36-year-old Brady Corbet, of The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, the obvious critical move would be to liken Toth’s crazed, career-defining project - a rural Pennsylvanian community centre that resembles a 15-storey concrete spaceport - to Corbet’s own towering third feature. After all, The Brutalist is three and a half hours long (not counting a 15-minute intermission), spans two continents and three decades, and was shot in VistaVision, the luxuriously vibrant 1950s widescreen format loved by Alfred Hitchcock.

But to do so would get Corbet’s film completely backwards. Toth’s building is daunting, unwieldy and often inscrutable, but The Brutalist flies along seemingly effortlessly: both during and afterwards, it feels like the shortest long film ever made. As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. (How did the wave of post-war immigrants remake America in their image - and how did America remake them in return?) But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama and shot with the loose, rangy energy of a 90-minute indie cult hit. The tonal mix feels completely unique, but it works.

Van Buren employs Toth to build a lavish public building in memory of his mother. Photo / IMDB

Brody is tremendous as Toth, a dolorous Hungarian Jew who arrives in New York as an immigrant in the film’s opening scenes. An architect by trade, he finds work refurbishing the private library of one Harrison Lee Van Buren, an East Coast industrialist played by a never better nor more dapper Guy Pearce. Van Buren loathes the result until a glossy magazine writes about it favourably - so he then employs Toth to build a lavish public building in memory of his mother, on a hilltop close to the town that adjoins his estate.

The structure - part church, part library, part labyrinth - is wildly ambitious, soaring off towards sublimity and insanity at once. But even as the narrative spirals and cast swells (Felicity Jones, wonderfully moving as Toth’s wife, arrives from Europe in the second act), the film maintains a steely grip on its own ornate schemes. It’s cinema as monument - but also teeming human enterprise.