The Brooklyn Rail

Let’s get something out of the way: The Brutalist is not a movie about an architect. Despite pointed references to actual historical figures, the film does not attempt to fictionalize specific lives, works, or accomplishments. Despite being continually criticized for the historical inaccuracies in its portrayal of this period, criticism which I believe completely misses the mark, the film delivers a general sense of the times through the Easter eggs that director Brady Corbet carefully leaves throughout the film. At this superficial level, the film delivers. Of the many, one stood out to me: Miller and Sons, the protagonist’s cousin’s (Attila) furniture store, alludes to the American furniture brand Herman Miller. But I believe The Brutalist is more than that; I want to propose that the movie is, by itself, a work of critical architecture.

As such, this film is an example of precedent transformation applied. This method of study is common in architecture schools, and consists of analyzing the work of previous generations, redrawing it, understanding it, and transforming it as if its buildings and ideas were a malleable substance. The Brutalist extends this method: it not only transforms its predecessors but openly subverts them. It takes the American epic—a cinematic genre that has continually sustained an ideological scaffolding built on individualism, American exceptionalism, heroism, the triumph of good over evil, and the exploration of values such as freedom and justice—and methodically deconstructs and remolds it, presenting an unheroic narrative that refutes the structural foundations of this genre.

From its title, The Brutalist aligns itself with a lineage of films that adopt the “The _________” format: The Stranger, The Godfather, The Conformist, The Pianist, and The Revenant. This is not accidental, but signals this project’s dialogue with a broader history of films that revolve around a single protagonist’s exceptionalism. However, while these films often celebrate the moral or philosophical triumph (or tragic downfall) of their central figures, The Brutalist draws formal and thematic tropes from them and deploys them in service of a different purpose: the movie presents its protagonist not as an autonomous hero but as a profoundly dependent, vulnerable, and ultimately flawed figure.

The story follows László Toth, (a character loosely based on figures like Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Walter Gropius) a Hungarian, Bauhaus-trained Jewish architect forced into exile in the United States, seemingly set to fulfill the archetypal role of an ambitious immigrant. Yet, from the beginning, the story undermines this narrative expectation. Our protagonist is not Howard Roark nor Peter Keating (despite the inevitable parallels to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead); he is neither the unyielding individualist visionary genius nor the opportunistic conformist who rises through charm and compromise rather than talent. Instead, László is a complex and insecure man deeply entangled in a network of financial, emotional, and existential dependencies. His story is not one of self-actualization but, instead, one of erosion, a slow and painful dissolution of autonomy in the face of external pressures and internal obsessions.

As an antithesis to its precedents, The Brutalist revolves around unfreedom—unsubtly declared by the image of the Statue of Liberty portrayed upside down in the film’s overture and poster. While most American epics celebrate independence and self-made success, The Brutalist exposes this construct’s fragility. László is never truly in control of his life—throughout the film, he’s shaped, manipulated, and abused by the conditions and people around him, first by his cousin, then his wife, and later, by his client. These are presented less as personal failings but rather as an ultimately unavoidable condition of circumstance.

Temptation and desire, key elements in the film’s exploration of unfreedom, first emerge personified in Attila’s wife, Audrey, who is dressed in red—fulfilling the role of the femme fatale. Here, however, this archetypal figure is not presented as a risky love interest but as a manifestation of László’s most profound psychological tendencies: a lack of self-esteem, and an incapability of self-determination. The recurring drug use in the film underscores these tendencies as László repeatedly caves into his addictions and gives in to their oppression in a journey of constant surrender. Erzsébet and Zsófia (László’s wife and niece, respectively) are also agents in the erosion of the myth of the self-made man. Both characters are powerfully portrayed as a counterpoint to László’s dependency arc, exerting their autonomy toward the end of the film.

Unlike the traditional arc of the American epic, which often culminates in a moment of revelation, redemption, or downfall, this film arrives at a different kind of ending—neither happy nor tragic but profoundly and beautifully disappointing—and this is precisely what makes it appropriate and effective. The protagonist’s fate is neither a cautionary tale nor a triumphant validation of his struggles. Instead, it lingers in a space of uncertainty, challenging the viewer’s expectations of narrative closure. The camera pans across László’s life’s work in the epilogue, a bittersweet end to the film. Much like the house of bodies in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, the community center at the center of the plot—commissioned by the seemingly benevolent patron Harrison Lee Van Buren—and the rest of László’s projects are not much more than material remainders of his compromises, sacrifices, and psychological baggage. The Brutalist is a fable with an ambiguous moral.

The Brutalist does not reject the grandiosity and monumentality of its predecessors, nor does it shy away from employing their technical ambitions. Rather, it embraces them and deploys them in service of subverting the genre’s customary dogmas. In the parallel scenes of the coal mine and the marble quarry in Carrara, the sweeping cinematography by Lol Crawley emphasizes the protagonist’s smallness against his environment rather than his mastery over it. Machines and nature are portrayed as larger-than-life characters in the story. Daniel Blumberg’s musical score underscores the weight of inevitability and frailty through the persistent use of atonality, a fluid intercalation of genres, and non-musical instruments. Throughout the entire film, the score swings styles between classical orchestral composition, jazz, minimalist/noise, soft pianos, and electronic music. Most notably, in the epilogue, Blumberg fluidly transitions from a dramatic orchestral hit to an eerily upbeat disco-flavored synthesizer dance track. The precise editing by Dávid Jancsó reinforces the film’s fragmented sense of time and displacement over a linear progression of triumph. The abrupt cuts, lingering silences, and juxtapositions of past and present disturb the temporal continuity of a traditional epic.

The Brutalist is more than a film about an architect—it is a meditation on the architecture of cinematic myth-making, exposing the cracks in the very foundations of American cinema. Moreover, the American epic as a genre has long functioned as a vehicle for gendered, identitarian, and nationalist narratives, romanticizing and celebrating the American dream while ignoring the structures that make it inaccessible to most. The Brutalist confronts these assumptions not through didactic exposition but through the very architecture of its storytelling. The film presents a radical inversion of the genre’s traditional themes and techniques by refusing resolution, rejecting the hero’s journey, and foregrounding dependency over autonomy. In doing so, The Brutalist doesn’t just deconstruct its protagonist—it exposes, dissects, and reconstructs its genre’s entire structure.