The Brutalist movie review: The Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce-starrer prays at the altar of itself

But it is also a film that desperately wants to be about architecture, spaces, legacy, art, and telling your stories through them.

But it is also a film that is about marriage, and what distance and horrors like the Holocaust can do to it.

It’s also about the Jewish experience and, yes, Israel. And about being Black, in a way.

Also Read | Flow movie review: A ripplingly gorgeous and lusciously resonant animated film

What connects the disparate strands that seek to shed light on the dark side of the American dream – and, at one level, the distance between it and a shared European nightmare – is the film’s name ‘The Brutalist’. It stands for the struggles of László Tóth (Adrien Brody) to make a new life and earn a new name for himself, and the form of architecture that this Bauhaus School product swears by.

Tóth faces ostensibly little struggle after he first reaches America, to a vision of an upside down Statue of Liberty. There is a cousin who houses and hires him, and gives him the good news that his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are alive and together back home in Hungary. He also gets him an assignment that puts him in the same room as the kind of self-made and proud-of-it American millionaire that we all know (or are getting to).

Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr (Guy Pearce) also bears the kind of name that deserves a building, and he sure as hell will get one. After a brief fracas with László, Harrison hires him to build his vanity project – which also increasingly becomes László’s.

That in itself is enough of a story to fill the high-ceilinged, spartan memorial that the two are pouring their money and life into. However, the long descriptions and depictions of this seem to exist as much to impress as to propel the story, which is also tangentially asking us to explore other issues.

The interactions between László and Harrison are the highlights of The Brutalist, with the two disparate men circling each other as if in a ring, aware of their weak spots, looking for them in the other. We have seen Brody do this role, and always pretty well, before. But it is Pearce who is a sensation as a man who is barely able to hide his hungry, preying side, even at a laden dinner table and even as he talks of grander, bigger things.

Also Read | A Complete Unknown movie review: Timothee Chalamet is impressive in powerful Bob Dylan biopic

Jones is also good as Erzsébet, the wife who could be so much more. However, much as the War did, the film doesn’t allow her any real agency.

This A24 film has 10 Academy Award nominations, and is expected to bag more than a few come the big night. Its cinematography, sense of light and dark, the tactile sensation it conveys of the building materials, make it a delight, not letting its long length – with a “15-minute” intermission built in, and counted down with a timer on screen – weigh it down.

But what Erzsébet says of her husband’s obsession with the project may well describe The Brutalist: “It prays at the altar of itself.”

The Brutalist movie director: Brady Corbet
The Brutalist movie cast: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Isaach De Bankolé
The Brutalist movie rating: 3.5 stars