A Film That Earns Its Running Time
The Brutalist is three hours and thirty-five minutes long and does not waste a frame of it. Brady Corbet's account of László Tóth — a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to America — uses its scope to do something that shorter films cannot: it allows its protagonist to age, to fail, to be destroyed and reconstructed, across decades and across a marriage and across an artistic vision that the world does not reliably reward.
Adrien Brody's performance is the fulcrum on which everything else turns. It is a performance of extraordinary physical and psychological reach — Brody ages convincingly across thirty years without prosthetics, carrying the history of the character in the way he moves through space, the register of his voice, the quality of his attention in scenes where László is required to be present but not heard.
The Film's Central Argument
The Brutalist is, among other things, a film about the relationship between artistic vision and the patronage that enables or corrupts it. Guy Pearce's Harrison Lee Van Buren — the wealthy patron who commissions László's career-defining project — is one of the most chilling antagonists in recent cinema not because he is evil in a legible way, but because his damage is structural and rationalised. He believes he is helping. That belief is the film's horror.
Verdict
The Brutalist is a landmark. That word is used too casually in film criticism, but it applies here in the precise sense: it marks a position in the landscape that you orient yourself against. It will be studied, argued about, and returned to for decades. One of the essential films of the 2020s.