The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024, USA/UK/Canada)

The Brutalist is the latest film from director Brady Corbet, and his first to break out beyond the arthouse crowd. "Break Out" is relative - though this is the director's most mainstream film, it is still a 3-and-a-half-hour period-set biopic involving complicated subject matter. The film may not have landed as loudly as it has were it not for the Adrien Brody performance at the center of the film. It has been almost 25 years since Brody became one of the youngest Best Actor winners in history, and there are certainly parallels between his performance in The Pianist and The Brutalist.

The film centers around a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States following the war and attempts to rebuild his life. His wife, played by Felicity Jones, is trapped and Europe and absent for much of the beginning of the film. The third major figure in the film is Guy Pearce as Harrison Lee Van Buren, a wealthy industrialist who commissions Brody's character to build a community center in his hometown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Van Buren's motivations and intentions are intentionally hard to pin down, and his role in the film becomes largely one of exploring the American immigrant experience vis-a-vis the established WASP elite.

The Brutalist film carries literary ambitions, not only in its epic runtime but also in its form - the film is divided into two sections, divided by an intermission. It also features a prologue and epilogue. There is a choice toward the end of the film which may turn off some viewers, as it renders the film's metaphor in real terms. That said, The Brutalist is certainly an accomplishment of form and performance, and for all its length, it moves at a great pace. Corbet is a talented filmmaker with an ambitious vision.

7/10