Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When an innovative modern architect flees post-war Europe, he is given the opportunity to rebuild his legacy. Set during the dawn of the modern United States (in Pennsylvania), his wife joins him, and their lives are forever changed by a demanding, wealthy patron.
The Brutalist is an extraordinary, sweeping epic — a three-and-a-half-hour examination of ambition, trauma, artistic compromise, and the corrosive promise of the American Dream. Adrien Brody delivers a career-best performance anchoring a uniformly exceptional cast including Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce. Brady Corbet's direction is visually stunning, shot in VistaVision with a painterly, monumental quality that mirrors its subject's architectural vision — the cinematography is genuinely exceptional. The film's conception is wholly singular: a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor rebuilding himself through brutalist architecture in postwar America is a rich, original premise executed with uncommon ambition and specificity. The plot is dense, layered, and emotionally devastating across decades. The ending, while thematically coherent, feels slightly overwrought and rushed relative to the meticulous patience of what precedes it, landing with less inevitability than the film's weighty buildup demands — the one area where the film falls marginally short of its own towering standard.