Why ‘The Brutalist’ Is Brutal to Watch

There’s no brutalist architecture in The Brutalist. This terrifically named film—directed by former child actor turned would-be auteur Brady Corbet; cowritten by him and his partner in life and work, the director Mona Fastvold; and production-designed by Judy Becker—recounts the years 1947 to 1960, plus a 1980 dénouement and coda, in the life of an imaginary Jewish Hungarian American emigré, Holocaust survivor, and brutalist architect called Lazlo Tóth. He’s played by Adrien Brody, who with evident pleasure and the accent of a Yiddish vampire reprises the handsome and haunted Holocaust survivor persona of his breakthrough role in The Pianist. Everyone’s been nominated for Academy Awards. The movie was, its Oscar campaign has emphasized, made relatively fast and cheap: 33 days’ filming (after seven years of development), all for a reported $10 million before marketing. As a matter of that marketing, this emphasis on economy might be intended to make a virtue of the film’s emphasis on greatness—in a narrow aesthetic of awe inspiration that goes unquestioned by its characters, and maybe also by its makers. The film aspires to magnificence. And for the import required for such grandeur, to themes of the American dream and the mid-20th-century immigrant experience, vibing into its pseudo-Saul-Bellow era.

But showing no brutalist architecture in The Brutalist is like making Amadeus without any Mozart on the soundtrack. The architectural designs that we do see are more Mantovani than Mozart. But it’s worse. For it’s not as if Amadeus was the only chance that its audience had to hear “Dies Irae.” But the immersive medium of film is the only way that so many might experience brutalist buildings—they are rare—and to have their consciousness expanded by their radically humane vision.

A brutalist is no brute. The word does not denote, as pianist to piano, a specialist in brutality. In architecture, a brutalist is a practitioner of the movement of brutalism, which thrived in the trans-Atlantic world between 1955 and 1975. It was defined as the “new brutalism,” around 1955, by the influential British critic Reyner Banham to describe design that used heavy cast concrete to achieve a lightness of experience by choreographing people through many levels and raising their eyes—and spirits—through artfully composed sightlines and daylighting. Banham traced this movement to the postwar work of British architects Alison and Peter Smithson, who themselves took the provocative word from béton-brut, French for “raw concrete,” a phrase used by the influential modern architect Le Corbusier for the rough surface achieved by leaving visible the striated traces of wood-board concrete casting; and perhaps also from art brut, or “raw art,” a 1940s coinage for outsider art. And so for working with things as we find them and not as we might wish them to be—what Banham cherished as the movement’s “ineloquence.” Something about brutalism’s combination of sublimity and sobriety allowed it to perfectly serve the postwar and nuclear age—and so to offer essential lessons for our own straitened times.

There’s also no story in The Brutalist—in the sense of a causal, linear account of characters tested and transformed by their encounter with the world and with one another. Stuff just happens. Nobody much changes. The audience is instead informed by epistolary voice-overs, montages under newsy radio broadcasts, and dialogue in which people say things like, “I’ve found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating,” in order to indicate that one character has found another to be persuasive and intellectually stimulating.

That line is delivered to Tóth by the character who is—by making the decisions that lend it such a story as it has—effectively the protagonist of the movie: a rich guy played by Guy Pearce and bearing the Waspy McPresident name of Harrison Van Buren. He’s a Gatsby-ish executive, capricious and self-made, yet sensitive to the finer things in life, and Tóth’s sole patron. Van Buren recognizes Tóth’s ostensible genius after first rejecting the architect’s plans for a home library. This allows Tóth to move out of his Philadelphia flophouse and onto the Van Buren estate. You know you’re supposed to like Tóth because, in a literal fulfillment of screenwriting shorthand for how to make a character likable, he saves a cat from a gutter. You know Toth’s supposed to be a tortured genius because, rather like Sherlock Holmes with the opium, he is a high-functioning heroin enthusiast.

The rich guy commissions the architect to design something he calls the Van Buren Institute, a monumental community center—a library, chapel, theater, and such—for the people of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. This goes up, as slowly and heroically as a cathedral that it resembles, nowhere near close-knit Doylestown but alone atop a treeless and windswept hill in Hungary, where the movie was shot. Van Buren uses political connections to rescue Tóth’s wife and niece from refugee limbo in Europe. Soon a train crash derails the great architectural project, and Tóth retreats to New York for a few offscreen years. But then—plot point!—by dispensing with the library in the community center, Van Buren finds the funds to rehire his architect and restart their great endeavor.

Here come, in more than one sense of the word, the spoilers. The two men travel to pick out stone (a material not much used in brutalism) at the famous marble quarries of Carrara, Italy—whence the stuff of Michelangelo sculptures and Bernini buildings—where, once Tóth is drugged and drunk at a party in a cave, Van Buren sexually assaults him. This heel turn is narratively unearned—nothing much evolves in the relationship between the two men over their dozen years of association—but it does enable the film to remove any ambiguity about who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, and to wrap things up with a bang. Tóth’s wife—after surviving, in the predictable manner of so many such movie scenes, a heroin overdose administered by Tóth in a misguided attempt to ameliorate her osteoporosis pain—testifies to Van Buren’s assault while he’s hosting a dinner party, after which the rich guy vanishes. Tóth and family move away to Israel.

By this point, just ahead of its 1980 dénouement and coda, The Brutalist doesn’t seem to have got all that much right about human nature. It has got almost everything wrong about that part of human nature called modern architecture. Here are some of those things:

1. The library renovation that is Tóth’s ticket to the patronage, all curtains and curves and coves and folding veneered panels, in the Parisian style of the 1920s and 1930s, in the art deco-adjacent manner of Pierre Chareau and Robert Mallet-Stevens. To be told that it was designed by a graduate of the famously industrial Bauhaus School at Dessau in Weimar, Germany, under the tutelage of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, as Tóth reveals himself to Van Buren to be, is like hearing a clip from The Chronic presented as the apotheosis of East Coast hip-hop.

2. To the rich guy, in the scene of their first intimate meeting, the architect says of his built work back in Budapest, “My buildings will endure. […] I expect them to remain.” Any such notion of architecture would have been a pathetic anathema to Dessau-trained architects of this character’s generation: After the industrialized perfection of warfare, the Spanish flu, and the social and political collapse of the orders of the 1870s, they sought an unremaining architecture—as fast and replaceable as that era’s sports cars and biplanes. And all the more so after the war that followed. Then as now, the idea was, to coin a phrase, move fast and break stuff.

3. All architects really want to do in real life is sit somewhere quiet and draw. In the one brief scene where Tóth does so, he uses blunt and smudgy charcoal, sensually applied to heavily opaque watercolor paper. Just like a young Leo capturing the titanic form of Kate Winslet. Architects of Tóth’s milieu used fine hard graphite and sharp collage on layers upon layers of translucent tracing paper—the pellucid and precise nature of those media translating into the design itself. But for two famous Mies van der Rohe renderings that are the rule-proving exception, charcoals and other such smudgily expressive media were mostly taboo after the technocratic Gropius famously fired all the old woo-woo instructors. Bauhaus grad Tóth would only have used charcoal to grill hamburgers.

4. Complementing such drawing is truly cooperative work. Architects call it studio culture. The relative democratization and radicalization of studio culture was arguably the greatest legacy of the Bauhaus. A building of the kind Tóth designs for Van Buren would require an office of scores of partners, draftspeople, specialists, and supernumeraries. This community—like the team in a heist film—practices patient yet urgent repetition, iteration, and speculation through mutual accommodation and interrogation. The Brutalist just gives us The Pianist in a rich guy’s pool house.

5. During the era covered by The Brutalist, modern architecture in America was run by three very different towering figures: the ex-Bauhaus wartime emigrés Walter Gropius at Harvard and Boston and Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Chicago; plus, at Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, the Jewish Lithuanian American immigrant Louis Kahn. Kahn’s mystical and moody work was a rare American example cited by Reyner Banham in his definition of brutalism. The Brutalist mostly takes place in Kahn’s Philadelphia, so Brody’s work would have been profoundly influenced by what was called Kahn’s Philadelphia School. To feature none of this in The Brutalist is like making a movie about an imaginary modern painter in interwar Paris with no cubism and no Pablo Picasso.

6. Brutalism “reared its head in the 1950s,” Corbet recently told the online design journal Dezeen, “and so it was the correct style of architecture in terms of the film’s visual allegory and what it is exploring thematically.” This is so. But that’s not the style of architecture seen in the film. Aside from featuring some of brutalism’s signature cast concrete, Corbet and company have made Tóth’s masterpiece into something that, in its classical symmetry, verticality, and formality, isn’t even modern. Symmetry was the one true anathema for brutalist architects, who sought experiential variety over reductive formal order. Many in the movie are awestruck by the dainty cross-shaped skylight at the heart of the structure—which was anachronistically inspired, Judy Becker has told media outlets, by a similarly excised wall in the rather hokey 1989 Chapel of Light near Osaka, Japan, by the non-brutalist minimalist Tadao Ando, and by the contemporary also non-brutalist sculptor James Turrell. But as a matter of aesthetics, the sensibility behind this kind of winsome detail—flat, graphic, pictorial, willful, symmetrical, didactic, and prim—is precisely that to which brutalism developed in resistance.

If the makers of The Brutalist had driven the three hours south from the bleak Hungarian hillside where they ratcheted up their spaghetti Western-looking sets—to, say, Novi Sad in Serbia, and across the former Yugoslavia—they would have found the densest and finest concentration of brutalist architecture in all the world. Brutalism had a 40-year history there as the state-sanctioned style of the Yugoslav regime—as a “third way” alternative to the pastrylike neoclassicism of the Soviet Union and the glass-and-steel Miesian modernism of the West. Hotels. Churches. Universities. Memorials. Palaces of the People. Imagine if the filmmakers had ingeniously collaged together an imaginary brutalist masterpiece out of glimpses of Yugoslavia’s surprisingly well-preserved and truly greatest hits. Or else just shot the whole thing at the brutalist Croatian hotel at which, with just a little medieval set dressing, Game of Thrones made that awesome episode where The Mountain slays Prince Oberyn of Dorne.

7. At the movie’s coda and dénouement, the tragedy gets a happy ending. Brody is celebrated at the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, a festival that was indeed held in 1980 and was indeed curated around the theme “The Presence of the Past.” (Maybe the suggestiveness of this watery wonder is why in real life the film was similarly fêted at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.) But everything else is impossible. That year saw not praise but burial for the generation of designers, however august, represented by Tóth—who’s by-then establishmentarian and even rote evocations of sublimity had been cleverly supplanted by practitioners of the jokey, pop-historicism of the architectural style of postmodernism. And the explosion of which the 1980 Biennale was the cultural ground zero. The past they were presenting was not the 1940s of the Holocaust and World War, but a serio-comic escapist fantasy of classical columns and picturesque piazzas.

It’s a missed opportunity to address what happens in creative lives when one movement, however perfected, gets supplanted by another. At the movie’s Biennale, we see an exhibition of what is purportedly Brody’s lifelong body of work. It’s a nonsensical and anachronistic hodgepodge of tidy Dutch De Stijl of the middle 1930s, jagged Russian constructivism of the late 1910s, and gray post-Miesian high modernism of the early 1960s. Still no brutalism. And this nothing comes out of nowhere and from no one—because there has been no through line of creative search, and so neither any apparent personality nor any expressed evidence of personhood in the body of work. Corbet told Dezeen that, “It was very important that [Toth’s work] had a real impact […] It’s like making a film about a fictional painter—if the paintings aren’t good, the whole thing falls apart.” In this, he is correct.

Tóth’s now-adult niece opens that exhibition with a speech, while her ancient uncle looks on. In this film of so much telling, she tells the Venetian audience—and so also us, the audience at the movie theater—that the design of the Van Buren Institute was designed less to serve the people of midcentury Doylestown than as an object for the magical thinking of its designer. The soundtrack that has reliably told us what to feel throughout the film now prepares us for a big reveal! Which is that the chambers and towers of the community center are in fact recreations from memory of elements from the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps: a tunnel on which Tóth insisted in an earlier scene is explained to be the means by which he—in his latter-day imagination—can finally travel unimpeded the 400 kilometers from the former, where he was interned, to the latter, where his wife and niece were interned. “The big eureka moment came from trying to incorporate the concentration camps,” Becker told Dezeen. Why this design decision exegetically serves the story, or diegetically would make a good community center for the people of Doylestown, is left unexplained. Inside the movie, everybody claps.

I can’t imagine why they would. It’s such a tender and subtle matter to make architecture about the Holocaust. It’s generally only a useful procedure in the case of designing buildings for Holocaust museums. Daniel Libeskind, in a building of atypical excellence in his career, the 2001 Holocaust Museum in Berlin, achieved a yearning tension between a void space that could only be seen but never physically entered and an angularly convoluted circulation space that recursively and ruminatively crossed and recrossed the void. James Inigo Freed, an associate of I.M. Pei, rose similarly to his creative peak in designing the 1993 building for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He provocatively used details that recalled both the rude brickwork of Auschwitz and the stony stripped classicism of National Socialist Berlin—eerily echoed in some contemporary neoclassical landmarks of Depression-era Washington—and so to uncanny effect temporarily resignified the architecture of the surrounding city, mapping stated virtues onto stone and unspeakable vices onto brick. Part of what these two buildings managed, each in their very different ways, was a radical encounter between the personal and the universal, the introspective and the empathetic. Either through an uncanny embodied intimation, as in Berlin, or through a surreal visual association, as in Washington, the visitor, who may likely have begun only as a dutiful or dissociated tourist, becomes even semiconsciously, even unexpectedly, a traveler or a pilgrim or a seeker: by being returned to their senses—of balance, of vision—even as what those senses reveal is a constant strangeness just beneath the soothing or stimulating surfaces of everyday life.

The Brutalist, to the extent that such a work of cinema can be compared to those works of architecture, shares more its own spirit of tourism: aggrandizing intimations of importance, a not unpleasing sensation of dutiful boredom, a gratifying but undemanding proximity to something epic yet generic. Tóth, though very loosely based on some real historical figures, is mostly a type with no especially evident personhood where we would best seek it in an architect—his architecture—and no particular personality but for haplessness and greatness. “We wanted to talk about these bigger concepts,” screenwriter Fastvold told The New York Times, “and if you’re locked into a real person, then it’s harder to do because you’re married to what happened to them versus just looking at this period in time and the relationship between postwar psychology and postwar architecture.” But as any screenwriting handbook will tell you (as well as “Save the Cat”), specificity is the soul of story. Only with the personal and particular can you tell a universal story. Only with the little can you assemble the big. If there is any redemptive usefulness in art—even in mere architecture, which must also keep the rain out—it is perhaps in this.

What gives The Brutalist its vague shape of a tale of redemption, of a story about the progressive integration of extraordinary experience into ordinary life, is mostly all that clapping in Venice. Plus the music. But by then, mostly what we’ve seen in the movie is Tóth just being ever more hazardous and getting ever more hurt—with a strange consistency that may remind some viewers of the genre of horror cinema called torture porn. This genre—Saw, Hostel—was defined in 2006 by film critic David Edelstein and is today generally understood significantly to have been a cultural response to the actual torture to which Americans were becoming witness in the so-called “war on terror,” including the American Abu Ghraib version of “enhanced interrogation” and waterboarding. This all featured in the Fox television show 24, in which—also in 2006—Brady Corbet starred as Derek Huxley, a teen to whom the series’ brutal hero Jack Bauer, in the manly person of Kiefer Sutherland, becomes a father figure. Young Derek gets much assaulted, kidnapped, and threatened with death, courtesy of chaotic evil Russians Vladimir Bierko and Anton Beresch. Homicides and suicides are regularly threatened. Bauer interrogates and tortures a bad guy by means of a knife to the eyeball. After 24 hours, all’s well that ends well. If the dramatic staging of torture as entertainment has any redeeming feature, it may be that viewers can process their own preceding and enduring traumas by practicing on the fake ones they see in the movies—once they leave.

What’s amazing about brutalist architecture—why I wish there had been some in a movie that bears the movement’s name—is that it is precisely an architecture of recovery and redemption and regeneration. Forged not in war but in the immediate postwar, it was an architecture of hard times and high hopes—which by its clear-eyed refusal to make the world pretty left room for the possibility that it could still become beautiful. Which is probably why today, when we mostly mediate our moods and communicate our culture through pretty pictures, it’s not especially popular.

Just 20 miles from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in suburban Trenton, New Jersey, is the Jewish Community Center of the Delaware Valley, built in 1955. It’s an event space and changing rooms for swimming pools, designed by that towering Philadelphia architect and brutalist Louis Kahn, with his sometime partner in life and work, the mathematician and designer Anne Tyng. Devoid of petty grandeur, it’s a low composition of simple cement block stone walls topped by heavy timber and shingled pyramidal roofs, whose peaks are truncated by open skylights. Sometimes I think it’s the best building in America. The courtyards and roofs appear so massive from the outside and confer exceptional gravity. And yet from within there’s nothing but lightness and the play of light. Solemnity at a distance yields to levity up close. Because the roofs are shifted and opened away from the walls, you always feel held but never confined. Because the public courtyards are the same dimensions as the private courtyards that serve as showers and changing rooms, there are no surprises, and onstage and backstage are of equal dignity. This is brutalism at its earliest best. Many of the users of this community center may have earlier experienced such places as Buchenwald and Dachau. I think now about how the sensitive geometry of this place, made for the dignity and agency of the body, must have been an architecture of healing—not an involuntary revisitation by the past, but a way to finally come home into the present. It has nothing to do with the mere greatness in which The Brutalist has such relentless fascination and everything to do, in every sense of the word, with goodness.