The Brutalist (2024): A Review
A portrait of obsession, frustration, domination, and love
In 1947, a Hungarian-Jewish architect, László Tóth, immigrates to the United States in an attempt to create a new life after surviving the prison camp at Buchenwald and fleeing Soviet rule. Separated from his wife Erzsébet and niece Zsófia during the Holocaust, the Bauhaus-trained architect struggles to establish and provide for himself in Philadelphia while waiting and hoping that they will find their way to the States, too. A chance encounter with a wealthy but delusional industrialist gives László an opportunity to create a magnum opus as his wife and niece join him. But his spiraling obsession with the project and strained relationship with his patron lead him down a dark path that threatens him, his family, and the project that would define his career.
The following contains rampant spoilers. And a note of caution: the themes and scenes in the film—and, consequently, the review—are often bleak, violent, and graphic. If you have watched the film or do not plan to, but are interested in it, read on with that warning. Otherwise, I will not be offended if you stop reading here.
Obsession
László, played in a magnificent performance by Adrien Brody, is a Bauhaus-trained architect par excellence. Little time is spent expounding his theories, but his attitude is one familiar to the student of modern architecture. His buildings are not statements or arguments; they just are. They exist, clean and straightforward and unambiguous; pure forms that weather opinion and theory because they are indifferent to it. They are forces of nature and icons of nothing but themselves.
As he explains to his patron, the mustachioed Guy Pearce playing American millionaire Harrison Van Buren, about his pre-war work in Budapest: “I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear; a whole river of such frivolities may flow un-dammed, but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.”
László had grown up in the intellectual ferment of the Bauhaus as the avant-garde reeled against the death of the old country, old ways of living and warring, old ways of building and making. They were weary of and profoundly damaged by the violent tectonic shifts of the continent. The Bauhaus emerged as part of an effort to erect new ways of making and building founded on first principles. Light and darkness, form and void, honest materials and straightforward shapes were their methods.
It was a method that could not be adulterated. And László was a purist, obsessed to his own detriment with enacting his singular vision for any project he took on. Early in the film, when he began working at his Americanized cousin’s furniture store, he built pieces that were straight from the Bauhaus: simple, direct, bare forms crafted with precision from industrial materials. They jarred against the inoffensive Craftsman style of his cousin’s shop. But that did not matter to László. Even at the utmost of his immigrant precarity, he made no compromise.
To its credit, the film did not try to explain or justify László’s single-minded devotion to brutalism as his commissioned project took shape. It let the viewer imagine what years in Buchenwald would do to an architect already with one foot out of the old world and into the new. It put us in the mind of a man who, when asked if he would ever go back to Europe, scoffed and grumbled a no that had all the blank-faced brutality of one of his buildings. It was an answer the audience almost didn’t need to hear, so forceful an answer was the backdrop of his life.
In one scene, a consulting architect secretly hired by the contractor sneaked in cost-saving measures to significantly shorten the building, making the absurdly high ceiling heights more pedestrian. By the time László discovered this duplicity, it was too late to add more height above, so he liquidated his fee (the only income he had) to dig the building deeper into the ground, making up for the lost height in new depths. Why? It was this moment that László’s obsession went from destructive to self-destructive. He was self-immolating on a concrete altar of his own design. What could possess him to threaten his and his family’s utter ruin for the sake of ceiling height?
Frustration
For all that had gone wrong in László’s life, three things went incredibly right in quick succession. In the opening scene, he emerged from the labyrinthine bowels of a crowded ship and into the daylight in time to glimpse the Statue of Liberty. A short time later, he arrived by bus in Philadelphia to meet his cousin, whose first words to him were the joyous news that his wife Erzsébet—played by Felicity Jones—and niece were still alive. And within a few short years, he received the kind of commission a progressive architect could only dream of: a wealthy, indulgent enthusiast for the arts who wanted to spare no expense on his masterpiece.
But nothing really went right. Haunted by a terrible chronic pain from a train-hopping accident in Europe, László became addicted to heroin while confined to the ship on his overseas journey. It served as a joyless hook for him, an obsession that dragged him away from his friends, nearly ruined his work opportunities, and almost killed his wife. His nagging pain and addiction, and his wife’s famine-induced osteoporosis, formed a nauseating rhythm, like the jangling avant-garde soundtrack of the film, that pervaded every aspect of their lives.
So too is László’s psychosexual frustration evident from the outset. His first act, on landing in New York, is to visit a seedy brothel with a shipmate, only to leave disappointed. Days later, when he arrives in Philadelphia, he is overcome with joy when his cousin tells him that his wife is still alive but stuck in Europe. His spiraling heroin addiction soon loosens his inhibitions and draws him to a libertine jazz club. But even when surrounded by the prospect of easy sex, he leaves the dancing to shoot up in the bathroom. Later, reeling through the darkened streets of Philadelphia, he stumbles into a backroom pornography theatre only to fall into a drug-induced sleep inside.
After Erzsébet’s eventual arrival, his guilt over his infidelities and her physical frailty leave him frozen and distant. She regularly experiences bouts of crippling pain that she barely manages with her own medication. One night, she has another episode but has run out of pills. In his desperation, László doses her with heroin and she finally relaxes. It is only in this shared high that, their pain forgotten, they really lose themselves and are united again. That the heroin nearly kills Erzsébet, that his addiction and release are so bound up together, gives him no real escape. All along, László has been yearning for a physical belonging that, even in the free West, the dance clubs, and the return of his wife, he cannot find.
Domination
Much of the film centers on the struggle for dominance between László and his patron, Van Buren. When Van Buren arrives to offer László a commission, he finds him standing atop a coal heap holding a shovel. László evinces no subservience. He stands towering above Van Buren stoically, silhouetted against the sky. Van Buren’s offer becomes a supplication against his will.
As many patrons do, Van Buren affects a great reverence for the unquestioned genius of his sponsored artist and defends him against many questioners—city officials, neighbors, wealthy friends, contractors, and other architects. But Van Buren wants more than to commission a great work of architecture in the memory of his mother: he wants to possess the art; to become a part of something great and to feel responsible for it. Even as he fêtes László at social gatherings, he betrays flashes of resentment and scorn toward his artist. An aggressive man with only flimsy mastery over his temper and appetites, Van Buren cannot help but despise László’s accent, his shabbiness, his bohemian sensibilities, and his Jewishness. And László feels this rejection and lack of belonging acutely, even in the treatment he receives from his own cousin and his Catholic wife.
As the project finally matures, industrialist and architect rendezvous in the Italian Alps. László has arranged to meet an old stonemason friend of his to select a fitting piece of Carrara marble for the altar of the chapel in the project. Van Buren senses his growing isolation from the project, huffing and puffing up the mountain behind László and the mason as they joyfully reminisce and apes their appreciation for a fine block of marble. The mason takes them that night to a quarried-out underground discotheque, but Van Buren watches impassively from a balcony overlooking the effortlessly cool crowd. One wanders if he is resentful at the way László is so comfortable and dances so unreservedly, so unlike the starving, coal-shoveling immigrant persona he first met.
As always, it is László’s addiction that draws him away from the crowd. Following him into the cavernous labyrinth of the quarry, Van Buren comes upon his incapacitated architect and rapes him in an assertion of domination, telling László:
It’s a shame seeing how your people treat themselves. If you resent your persecution, why then do you make of yourself such an easy target? If you act as a loafer living off handouts, a societal leech, how can you rightfully expect a different result? You have so much potential and yet you squander it. […]
Who do you think you are? You think you’re special? You think you float directly above everyone you encounter because you are beautiful? Because you are educated? You’re a tramp. You’re a lady of the night.
It is later, after László returns from this ill-fated trip, that he and Erzsébet have one their one moment of true (if heroin-induced) intimacy. While high, László confesses to his wife what Van Buren did. Soon after she recovers from her overdose, she goes alone to confront Van Buren at his home during a dinner party, and in the ensuing uproar, he disappears. As the night falls, searchers cover the grounds and scour the labyrinthine passages of the now-completed project for him. But as the dawn rises, it is clear that Van Buren is gone, as if swallowed up by the project that he once tried to possess. And at noon that day, as the sun reaches its zenith, a cross of light caresses the quarried marble altar Van Buren selected on that day in the mountains.
Love
It is not until the epilogue that the great and winding thread through László, Erzsébet, and the project are pulled together for the viewer. The project is not one building but multiple, connected by myriad subterranean corridors. Visitors had remarked, bemused, on the small size and strange arrangement of the rooms, coupled especially with the absurdly high ceilings ensured at such great personal cost. At the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, László’s niece Zsófia explains, with the haggard architect, now a widower, looking on, that all along the building was designed with a different purpose. The proportions and arrangements of the floor plan were an exact replica of the cramped prisons of Buchenwald and Dachau, the two camps that had separated László and Erzsébet, with two exceptions: the soaring ceilings bespoke freedom, and the subterranean passageways wove the camps together. These two changes re-wrote the couple’s separation and cast their union in indelible and unalterable concrete.
In his frustration and inability to be with his wife, the architect instead turned to the only medium he had left. Even when Erzsébet made it to the United States, and even as he cared for her and loved her in his dutiful, frustrating way, he was pouring his love for her and the suffering of their separation into formwork and building for them an enduring and utterly private monument.
Like Brutalism, this leaves much unsaid. As Zsófia explained in her speech to the Biennale:
In his memoirs, he described his designs as machines with no superfluous parts, that at their best, at his best, possessed an immoveable core; a “Hard Core of Beauty.” A way of directing their inhabitant’s perception to the world as it is. The inherent laws of concrete things such as mountains and rock define them. They indicate nothing. They tell nothing. They simply are.
But of course this retrospective presentation utterly drenched the project with previously hidden content. In a moment, it re-oriented the film from every one of its other motifs—of obsesion and domination and frustration and the immigrant experience—and to love. This was the film’s ‘hard core of beauty.’ Their relationship ravaged and battered by war, drugs, frustration, and obsession, they each had their own comeuppance. Erzsébet in her frailty succeeded in banishing her husband’s tormentor, and László had his private monument that spoke nothing to anyone, except to his wife. Did she know what it was?
Early in the construction of the project, and just after Erzsébet had arrived, László found his wife in his studio, looking through the plans for the building. In light of this epilogue, their exchange in the studio speaks volumes:
Every line is a thunderbolt. But this private moment between the couple, seen first as a casual scene, simply an establishing exchange, is the vessel for The Brutalist’s hard core of beauty. It denies the “it just is” frankness of brutalism in favor of a love that was cold and forbidding and perhaps damaged beyond repair, but solid and rooted deeply in the soil of the new world. The genius of the epilogue is that it rewards the viewer with the gradual unfolding of the private meaning of the project, and suggests that perhaps László’s monument to his marriage would endure erosion in America, too.