Brady Corbet’s second feature as a writer, director and producer is a statement as large and daring as the building at the heart of its epic story. Glowing callbacks to the cinema of the 1950s and an unsettling exploration of the competing ideologies of the 20th-century West and the human condition means its star is sure to rise long after its Awards window closes.

The Brutalist proudly displays that it was filmed in Vistavision, the 35mm fine-grained film variant pioneered by Paramount in the early 1950s. Vistavision is most famous for films like White Christmas, Vertigo, and High Society before its use dwindled a decade later—although it continued to be used for special effects sequences, including the original Star Wars trilogy and Jurassic Park.

Here, Vistavision exquisitely captures an epic, bruising fable.

Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and talented architect László Tóth (Adrian Brody) arrives in America after internment at Buchenwald concentration camp. Forcibly separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who are stuck in Europe following their release from Dachau, he struggles to forge a new life in the United States despite his Bauhaus training. His break comes when his talent is recognised by Penysylvanian mogul Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who plans a lasting legacy for his dysfunctional family. But are the two men, one a visionary genius and the other a wealthy admirer of genius, true to themselves and the forces that ultimately drive them?

Featuring a short overture and an intermission, The Brutalist is more than a nod to Golden Age Hollywood. It’s a striking film of two halves, delineated by its characters, time, and Tóth’s changing fortune. While love-it-or-hate-it Brutalism architecture is at the film’s heart, it only spends a short (yet vital) time inside Tóth’s creations. The real brutality lies in the interaction between Brody and Pearce’s characters and how they are brought together and driven apart against the backdrop of the American Dream.

Confident filmmaking touches spin around the years that track their inauspicious meeting and savage split. Wild spirals of jazz — often performed live on set and more present than  Daniel Blumberg’s searing, pounding but sparsely used central theme — reflect Tóth’s spiralling coping mechanism.

The Brutalist is a tactile film, but it’s also unexpectedly epistolary for much of its run-time. Action and thoughts are conveyed through letters from Erzsébet to Laszlo when physically estranged and later from her to her niece in Israel. Raffey Cassidy’s Zsófia is a fascinating and deftly drawn study of trauma in her own right, as well as bringing a light cycle of double-casting. Layered on top are newsreels on Pennsylvania’s political, industrial and societal history that run parallel to Tóth’s story.

Under Corbet’s stunning direction and Lol Crawley’s cinematography, which picks out colours like no recent film (and will surely herald a Vistavision renaissance), each part works to make a sumptuous whole. Corbet makes some breathtakingly deft decisions, and it’s as surprising they often feel so light as that he realised his vision for around the $10 million mark. The cast portraying his imperfect characters, led by Brody on top form, are his crucial blocks of concrete and marble.

The truth behind the characters’ actions comes late in the film, particularly for Tóth, connecting the hints and trails left through the clever screenplay by Corbet and Mona Fastvold. The satisfaction when these pieces fall into place, and the actions of both Tóth and Van Buren come into clear view is easily equal to the incredible building the architect struggles to complete over the years. Some viewers will find the purposeful ambiguity frustrating; others may find the dots that connect at the ending too much on the nose. But many will find it fitting that there are no final lines for many of the characters we’ve spent 215 minutes with. 

The Brutalist is a film that lands on its meaning with its closing moments. But that wouldn’t be possible without its meticulous and pitch-perfect construction, like the cube invoked by Tóth when asked why he became an architect, ‘Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?’ 

Blending reason and deliberation with ambiguity is where The Brutalist truly succeeds. To quote Van Buren, ‘This is a shock to you; I am delighted. I thought you would have seen it coming.’