by Oscar O’Sullivan

Film Festival hype can be a double-edged sword for a new film. On the one hand, rave reviews from the world’s top critics are going to come in handy for the eventual marketing campaign, as well as getting a head start on word-of-mouth. On the other hand, the film may be set up for an inevitable backlash – major festivals will often debut films months before their wide release, and endless online discussion and praise for a film 99% of people haven’t seen yet can see expectations set unattainably high. The Brutalist was shown at the Venice Film Festival back in September and won’t be released in the UK and Ireland until January 2025. How much higher would my expectations have climbed with an additional two months of anticipation, and how much more disappointing would the final product be?

Disappointing is a strong word, though apt. Everything about this film screamed “incoming masterpiece”, from the early reviews to the behind-the-scenes stories. A historical epic over five years in the making, produced on a shoestring budget of around eight million dollars and shot on an obsolete camera format, everything you could know about the film going in invites speculation. Let’s lay out the schematics – Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian architect who escapes the Holocaust and travels to the Land of Opportunity, his arrival captured in a rousing moment where the orchestral score blares and the camera flips 180 degrees to reveal the Statue of Liberty jutting down out of the great blue sky. László lives with an American cousin and works in his furniture shop as he awaits word from wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who remains trapped in Europe with mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). In his new home, László faces loneliness, economic hardship, casual discrimination and addiction, but he struggles on. In an early scene, waiting in line at a soup kitchen, he befriends fellow outsider Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), promising to hold a space for him so he can feed his young son. Even at his lowest, László understands the importance of solidarity and helping others. When wealthy employer Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) loses his temper and attacks László’s crew in a slur-filled tirade, he walks off the job – even if it costs him dearly, his principles come first. But Harrison proves to be an unexpected saviour when, with a cooler head and clearer eyes, he recognises László’s talent and makes him an irresistible offer – to come and design an ambitious community centre for the local town, with no restrictions. So László finds himself living in the lap of luxury, with friends influential enough to reach across the pond and bring his wife and niece to live with him. However, Erzsébet and Zsófia aren’t as quick to adapt to their new environment, while tensions between László and the many parties involved in his project threaten the stability of his entire life.

Practically everything I’ve just outlined takes place in the first half of the film, which is helpfully split into two titled parts with a built-in 15 minute intermission. All of this set-up in the first two hours is gripping stuff, the stakes of failure well established as the architectural challenge takes shape. Here also is where the film’s best-defined metaphor takes shape, Lázsló’s overly-ambitious construction of a bizarre modernist monolith being a clear parallel to director Brady Corbett’s own struggles to get this dizzying film made – there are shouting matches with penny-pinching consultants, tense pitch meetings with incurious locals, constant questioning of every creative decision the master architect makes and disastrous mistakes putting the entire endeavour at risk. László is protected to an extent by Harrison, who is fascinated enough by the artistry to fund it, though with the understanding that he’ll get more than his share of the glory should it prove successful. Guy Pearce gives the standout performance of the film, a stiff-necked industrialist who shoots straight and considers himself something of an intellectual. Pearce nails the physical mannerisms of the self-made man, steady and confident – he’s almost playing at being posh in that classic ‘new money’ manner, going through the motions of how a man of his station is meant to behave. When he loses his temper, we see the real him, nervy and abrasive, terrified of losing the wealth and status he has fought for. That said, Brody is still the star, carrying the weight of the monumental story on his shoulders. He laughs, he weeps, he shouts and roars without losing his (only slightly cartoonish) accent. This is a man who has seen horrors that the film tacitly avoids touching on directly – we see them on his face, so there is no need for words. When he gets into the business of his art, his brutalist architecture, he is a changed man, intense and commanding. However, this is not an environment where his command will be accepted. As Harrison’s smarmy son Harry (Joe Alwyn) puts it, “We only tolerate you, you know”. László is made to realise that he’ll never be accepted as anything more than a foreigner, an immigrant – he scoffs at his cousin changing his surname and claiming to be Catholic, but his strongly European and Jewish identity keeps him permanently on the verge of being cast aside by his American patrons.

The film’s second half is where the facade begins to crumble, revealing a foundation that isn’t as rock-solid as it first seems. While the filmmaking remains top-notch, the story gropes and fumbles for its next steps, events occurring seemingly at random as the narrative threads lose their fascinating lustre. It’s hard to tell if it’s doing too much or too little as it wraps up, whether the story is overburdened with disparate themes or if all the themes the first half contained were just coincidences, happy accidents that Corbett didn’t even realise he was tackling and thus couldn’t be expected to resolve. To use a clumsy architectural metaphor, he kept on adding and adding to the blueprint without realising that some of his design choices weren’t complementary. The introduction of Erzsébet in part two becomes an unfortunate issue for two reasons. First off, Felicity Jones is only so-so in the role, slurring her way through an unconvincing accent that seems to restrict her delivery to a flat monotone. Secondly, the script doesn’t quite have a handle on her purpose in the story – is she a strong-willed manipulator driving László forward, an independent soul shackled to her her husband by circumstance and her disability, a charming ray of light or a bitter recluse? Her role is whatever the film needs her to be at any given moment, making her constant presence become almost an annoyance as she distracts from characters with clearly defined goals. Here also is where the films’ jumps forward in time become a liability, passing enough time to make it feel like you’ve missed vital developments but not enough for the characters to visually age. The most egregious leap forward has niece Zsófia not only married and expecting a child with a man we’ve never seen before, but also speaking after being inexplicably and pointedly mute for the entire film up to now. It leaves you feeling like a scene has been skipped, even if it ultimately doesn’t matter to the overall story.

While chatting with Adam after the film (shoutout Adam), we came upon more than a few similarities to Paul Thomas Anderson’s seminal work The Master, enough that we have to wonder if there may be some intentionality to it. Both are lush post-war epics that see an addict joining the inner circle of a wealthy family, getting wrapped up in an ambitious project that becomes dangerous. Both deal with ideas of control, independence, home and belief, though in very different ways. Both films have a scene where a woman aggressively reprimands her husband while, ahem, jorking his peanits. A similarity that highlights the difference in approach and intent of these two films is how each film handles their own brand of homoerotic subtext. The Master is practically founded on the strange, tender, combative relationship between its lead and his wealthy patron, an extended commentary on masculine dynamics and abusive relationships. The Brutalist treats the relationship between László and Harrison as an intellectual partnership, almost devoid of real human feeling, until suddenly it isn’t – a sudden and shocking scene at an Italian quarry changes the whole tone of the character and, more bizarrely, is not examined in any depth afterwards. It’s something that shouldn’t be glossed over, yet the film does – why include it at all? Despite the obvious brilliance of The Brutalist‘s construction, the strength of the performances and the amount of fascinating ideas it does juggle in the three-and-a-half hour runtime, I can’t look at the finished product as anything other than a lifeless object. It fails to consolidate any of the potentially emotional components into a moving whole. It is certainly large, it is undeniably impressive, I’d even say I like it a lot – but I didn’t love it. And when you spend half a year hearing about how a new movie is going to be a timeless masterpiece, well, anything less than immediate love is going to be a disappointment. 8/10.