In a dark corner of a mansion in mid-century Pennsylvania, Erzsébet, a Hungarian immigrant rebuilding her life in America, pores over the contents of a desk. Scattered across it are sketches and technical drawings for a civic building, a grand folly designed by her husband László, for the wealthy patron whose home they now share. “What are you doing?” László says, walking in. “I’m looking at you,” his wife replies.
Years later that building is incomplete, though stands tall in its creator’s mind. A second chance to finish the job presents itself. “Promise me you won’t let it drive you mad?” Erzsébet pleads. Even as László promises he won’t, his voice betrays him. The madness — the obsession — is already there, deep within his marrow.
Director Brady Corbet’s film “The Brutalist,” a vast and imposing portrait of fictional architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor starting over in the United States, has already achieved near-universal acclaim. A Venice Film Festival winner and Oscar contender, including for Corbet and the movie’s lead actor Adrien Brody, it is both a new American epic and cinematic throwback, running over three-and-a-half hours, plus an intermission , and shot on VistaVision (a film stock which hasn’t been used by an American movie since 1961).
The thrust of the movie is Tóth’s commission to design a public institute for industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Tóth, a notable Jewish architect in Europe before World War Two, was interned in a concentration camp and relocates to America in 1947 at the start of the film. Once there, he learns his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) has survived the camps too, and longs to be reunited. Van Buren can assist with this, and help Tóth revive his career, but their relationship and its power imbalance comes at great personal cost.
Build me an architect
Corbet’s film, written with his partner Mona Fastvold, required not one but two people to embody Tóth: as well as Brody, production designer Judy Becker was charged with imagining then constructing the architect’s work.
“I am fortunate to have an understanding of that immigrant experience and the many parallels of an artist’s journey,” said Brody in a video interview with CNN.
“My mother is a Hungarian immigrant and emigrated to the United States after 1956 and the revolution in Budapest. There was a lot that I recalled from my youth of my grandparents, of things that were very familiar and very textural that were accessible to me to help shape him,” he added.
Brody was “the outward projection — but I was the person writing the poetry,” Becker quipped in a separate video interview.
Becker designed everything by Tóth in the movie, from pieces of furniture to a library for Van Buren and his institute. “I do method design in general,” said the designer. “I really tried to think about what (Tóth) had learned and experienced in his life at each moment, and I took that seriously. It’s always a dual process, me and the character, like it is for actors, except I don’t just disappear.”
“Some of it’s not going to show on screen,” she added, “but I think it helps make it feel real for the people on set, and that helps it look real on screen.”
“(Becker) brought so much to this,” said Brody. “To have the material and the form and the structure and something tangible there to represent all these other layers of his (Tóth’s) storytelling too … is really so meaningful and very artistic.”
Crafting the institute
We learn in the film that Tóth trained at the Bauhaus art school, “the starting point” for the production designer. Becker researched Bauhaus alumni and Modernist and subsequent Brutalist architects. “It wasn’t my first foray into Brutalism. I’ve loved Brutalism since before it was popular,” she said of the divisive movement that utilized unfinished concrete.
“He also went through one of the most horrible experiences a human could go through,” she said of the Holocaust, adding researching photographs and schematics of concentration camps “was the hardest part for me.”
Both Tóth’s personal and the professional spheres collide in Becker’s design for the institute, which takes on deep symbolic value.
The institute, a monolithic concrete structure perched atop a hill, needed to be radical, befitting a designer who can bluntly tell his patron, “You were not prepared for what you saw — it’s understandable.”
Becker said she drew on the work of Hungarian-German modernist Marcel Breuer and contemporary Japanese architect Tadao Ando, among others, for her creation, which is only shown in snatches, preserving its mystique while keeping costs down. (The movie was shot mostly in Hungary on a modest budget for a feature film, with estimates at $10 million or less.)
Two models were made, one two-foot high and made of card, which Tóth presents to Van Buren, and the other an in-camera miniature, about three-foot high and five-foot long. In the third act, as we’re drawn closer to the institute, various real locations were amalgamated, including the József Gruber Water Reservoir on Gellért Hill in Budapest, and a concrete silo.
From above, the building is shaped like a cross, featuring a chapel at its center and wings serving other community functions.
“The concentration camps were divided by a road, there were barracks either side, it was very rectilinear,” said Becker. “Everything was kind of in the shape of a cross.” Tóth, she added, “was Jewish and was constantly being forced into this Christian world, even when it came to America. So I wanted that to be a large part of the symbolism, obvious or not.”
The silhouette only tells part of the story, however. The building’s interior proportions – odd, impractical – are vital, to the point the architect refuses to budge when he’s advised to change them.
“I took it further than anyone knows,” said Becker. “I kind of designed it as an almost immersive experience for anyone who went into that building.” Claustrophobic rooms with high ceilings, windowless spaces and narrow stairs were crafted to mimick “the barracks that he and Erzsébet were imprisoned in.” Meanwhile, the central chapel, with its opening in the ceiling, represents a route out.
“There was a lot of references to imprisonment and freedom, and the visitor themselves is imprisoned in the building,” she added. “All of that really went into my design of the building, even though I knew it would never be in the movie.”
A ‘spiritual quest’
The institute becomes the embodiment of Tóth’s struggle, his enduring love for his wife, and a reckoning with his trauma. It’s also deeply subversive, in that it’s slipped inside the passion project of Van Buren, a man he comes to rightly loathe.
For Tóth, a heroin addict and rough around the edges, architecture is his most elegant way of communicating. “This Brutalist structure is symbolic of the shell of a man that he is,” said Brody, but also representative of a “spiritual quest.”
Cinema has made architects its subject before, but creator and creation are frequently at a disjuncture. Megalomanic architect Howard Roark in King Vidor’s “The Fountainhead” (1949) is a man ultimately larger than his on-screen creations. Anthony Royal in Ben Wheatly’s Ballard adaptation “High Rise” (2015) is a cypher for free market capitalism more than a creative force. Cesar Catalina, the architect in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” (2024), is a Nobel Prize-winner, but that’s the prime indicator of his genius, not what we’re shown (unless you’re wowed by travelators).
“Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” This question, posed by Tóth midway through the film, highlights the pitfalls of using one artform to depict another — and helps explain why cinema sometimes falls short in portraying architecture. All too often what’s rendered is a pale shadow of the real thing. “The Brutalist” succeeds in part because the architecture is impressive. But also because it inverts Tóth’s question: It imagines a structure which sums up its subject — a man otherwise unable to describe himself.
For all the emotional turmoil of creatives being creative littered throughout cinema – and there is plenty of that in “The Brutalist” — Corbet and his collaborators also make space to highlight the grace, catharsis and redemption the act can offer too.
Brody had plenty of sympathy for his character. “Part of what makes the film so special is that it parallels the journey and the yearnings of an artist,” said the actor.
“All artists, whether it’s an architect or a photographer or an actor or a painter, are somehow pushing to break past those boundaries and to build something of lasting significance to leave behind,” he continued. “That’s my journey. What motivates me is to find material that speaks to people and shares things on a level that’s much deeper than entertainment.
“The beauty of film is to leave behind something indelible.”
Poured concrete or celluloid; the artist need only choose their canvas. We see them either way.
“The Brutalist” debuts in US cinemas from December 20, and in the UK on January 24.
