To Make ‘The Brutalist’ Monumental, the Filmmakers Approached Cinema as Architecture

A hulking horizontal mass of gray concrete stands sentry on an eastern Pennsylvania hilltop, an imposing citadel in an otherwise bucolic expanse. Conceived by a local millionaire and designed by a Hungarian architect, the building is intended as a community center and church. Its facade is stark and unadorned; its interior spaces, many subterranean, are claustrophobic, even the ones with soaring ceilings. A cut in the roof projects a cruciform beam of light onto its marble altar, a flash of relief in this otherwise forbidding, severe piece of Brutalism.

This architectural fantasy, the Institute, is the physical center of gravity in The Brutalist, a 215-minute cinematic epic of midcentury America, the postwar immigrant experience, and the practice of architecture, directed and cowritten by Brady Corbet and opening nationwide next month. The film’s emotional core is László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, a Bauhaus-trained architect who escaped the Holocaust and struggles with his trauma and dislocation after settling in Philadelphia amid class and racial tensions. He’s ultimately commissioned to build the Institute by Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist who becomes László’s problematic patron. László is eventually joined in the U.S. by Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), his wife and protector, and also a survivor of the camps. Told in two acts broken up with a rare intermission, and spanning the years 1947 to 1960, the film is big: in length, scope, and drama. But it’s also restrained, with quiet scenes of achievement and despair doing as much heavy lifting as bombastic moments of triumph and defeat.