Film Review: The Brutalist (2024)

Author: Bryan Loomis

The Brutalist is over three and a half hours long, with an intermission. It’s shot on VistaVision, a film format primarily used in the 50s. Brady Corbet negotiated for final cut of the movie. But technical specifications and facts do not a good movie make. Such a movie comes pre-built with its own narratives around auteurism and the fight for the creative soul of moviemaking, that could crush it under the weight of its own mythology before it arrives. Megalopolis comes to mind. So it’s with something like relief that I come to tell you that The Brutalist, the actual movie, is very good.

This is a thematically rich film about immigrants and the very wealthy, and it has many things to say about both. Its characters are meant to function as metaphors, but not simplistic ones. We get a real deep dive on the psychology and the particular psychosis of America, and its effects on those who come here under promise of refuge. László and Erzébet represent the immigrant experience, and László does some unforgivable things throughout the movie but his position is primarily as a person that things happen to. Harrison Lee Van Buren represents America, and Guy Pearce channels his best Daniel Day Lewis to give a towering and menacing performance.

The craft behind this movie is very strong. The score is absolutely stunning. The VistaVision format isn’t just a gimmick, it makes everything look very tactile, with a spectacular detour to an Italian marble quarry being a visual standout. The production design of the film also impresses. Long shots are used very well, they often track characters dynamically like a Cuaron film but their effect is more Taiwanese New Wave in that the extension gives the actors room to breathe and find their performance. It’s an expertly paced movie, characters and themes are given time and space to develop but it never stops engaging the viewer. But for all the marketing around the auteurist vision of the film, what delighted me was that Corbet doesn’t really make choices designed to draw attention to the craft of the film. It’s masterfully humming along in the background, reinforcing the strong story being told.

The third act takes some risks that really paid off for me. When you’re trying to represent the rotten core of America’s rejection of people they consider “others”, it’s no time to show restraint. It isn’t really a twist, but one aspect of the very end of the film reminded me of the ending to Citizen Kane, which of course is bold but it felt like a natural completion of puzzle pieces placed earlier in the film. Overall this is a film that mesmerized me for a long evening and is still running in my brain, a very rich work to further discuss and digest in the coming months. I can’t wait to talk with you about it.