Lead ImageThe Brutalist, 2025(Film still)
The concrete dreams that crawled from the wreckage of postwar Europe is the subject of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, an American epic of stunning allegorical intent. At its heart is the rivalry between two men – László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor relocated to rural Pennsylvania, and Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a businessman who becomes his patron. This uneasy alliance of art and commerce helps bring Toth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) to America, where they’re invited to live with the Van Burens. It also leads to mounting conflict as Tóth, a student of the Bauhaus school with a spiralling drug habit, tries to wrestle his vision for a new community centre into being.
Corbet’s film signals its ambitions from the start, turning an image from The Godfather Part II upside-down in its opening moments and …