As the voice of concentration camp survivor Erszébet Toth (Felicity Jones) recites a letter to her Hungarian architect husband László (Adrien Brody), he arrives, free, in post-WWII New York. This is just the beginning of Mona Fastvold’s Best Picture Oscar-nominated film is concerned with who is hitching their wagon to whom along the way.

It’s notable then that Vox Lux’s Corbet (an actor, writer and the film’s director) and Fastvold (also a director and actress, who wrote and produced The Brutalist with her husband) managed to make their picture outside the studio system, with financiers they trust. Focus Features scored the international rights a year ago, with A24 climbing aboard for US distribution after its Venice Silver Lion win.

The Brutalist is also about numbers and milestones: 215 minutes in length; shot in 35 days for $10 million; the first American production to use VistaVision celluloid since Marlon Brando’s highest-rated films of 2024 and our top five dramas of last year, too.

As it expands to wider release in the States and cinemas across the world, more words are being added to the thousands already posted on Letterboxd about The Brutalist’s ambitions: its visually and thematically different halves, its stylish intermission, its unusual final few minutes. With these reviews as my guide, we embark on a detailed (i.e. spoiler-filled) tour of the film’s foundations across multiple interviews with its architects: Corbet, Fastvold and their fellow Oscar nominees Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones.

Reader beware: spoilers for The Brutalist ahead.

Primarily confined to a wheelchair, with complications of osteoporosis developed after surviving the concentration camps, Erzsébet uses Van Buren’s influence to restart her journalism career once she arrives in America with her niece, Zsófia. She is also the one who revives the couple’s sex life. It’s a refreshing reversal of the trope of the woman who is happy to exist in her artist husband’s shadows.

“I wanted to write a character that wasn’t just a doting wife,” says Corbet. “Mona and I were looking at the relationships between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and other extraordinary, very progressive couples like them. We wanted to hit that moment in time when men and women were finally finding themselves on more equal footing by being the right partner[s] for both of them.”

“I love that this movie is basically Into the Woods but for the American Dream … once you come back from intermission, everything goes to shit as the film rips away the fairy-tale veneer and exposes the rotten core.” —⁠Sunil

After Erzsébet’s arrival at the top of the second act, Jones observes that The Brutalist adopts her character’s defiant persona, becoming more confrontational. “Like László, the audience is also awaiting the arrival of this person. And when she comes with Zsófia, then suddenly the film takes on a different character in many ways and you realize quickly that Erzsébet is not someone who’s gonna do what she’s told. She has a very strong will.”

If its fictional characters were architecture, László forms the height of The Brutalist, and Erzsébet its concrete foundation. Wealthy financier Van Buren and his adult children might imagine themselves to be more than mere interior design touches, but time will always tell whose name—the one on the plaque, or the one on the blueprints—is ed.

“Opens like few can: churning darkness, overwhelming audio, a gentle narration that is almost consumed by the sounds, all culminating in a rapturous explosion of daylight … goes on to show that immigrants and refugees were viewed as less than human by those with power, authority, birthrights, and money. ‘We tolerate you,’ one vile character states midway through the film.” —⁠Steven

Upon his arrival from Europe, Toth quickly makes his way to Pennsylvania to work with his Americanized cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola). In the course of a surprise commission to transform Van Buren’s library, Toth meets, enrages and eventually impresses the self-made millionaire.

Soon, he is housed on the Van Buren estate, embarking on building a stunning, Brutalist community center, and anticipating a reunion with his wife and niece, thanks to his employer’s political connections. But the project—and Toth’s future—is always one violent action or reaction away from being scuttled, as Corbet explains that he and Fastvold “wanted to explore the shifting dynamic of a patron and an artist.”

Pearce continues, “I know that by flattering people, and offering them things, that they will do what I want them to do.”

Erszébet, however, sees through him instantly. “She’s got no hope in human beings,” Jones explains. “But at the same time, she’s a businesswoman and she’s thinking, how can we harness this person to our advantage?” Pearce agrees with Jones’s assessment that “they really don’t like each other at all and they’re just faking it because of László. They’re both deeply invested in him and they’re both trying to claim him.”

Adrien Brody, who has had his own architectural odyssey rebuilding Stone Barn Castle in upstate New York (as detailed in a 2008 30-page Hello! feature and a documentary that premiered at SXSW in 2015 but has not played publicly since), appreciates why Toth would not walk away from Van Buren’s commission, no matter the cost. “I was very obsessive,” he tells Letterboxd. “I employed teams of stonemasons for years. [Used] sand for re-pointing. It was done from instinct and what works for me in my needs for light and space. And so I understand that quality and yearning [of Toth] to stay true to his vision.”

Almost two decades on, Brody confirms he’s still working on the barn. “It’s a never-ending thing.” In this way, he says, The Brutalist “really speaks to the journey of artists. All of us. Filmmakers, painters, photographers, composers, architects, you know it. Anybody who’s doing anything, yearning to leave behind work, is living this struggle.”

“Brutalism is often interpreted as a means to express equality amongst all people, a direct and loud confrontation with the powers that rule … The more time that es, the more it’s revealed the concrete metaphorically is littered with efflorescence ... A country built on slabs full of rot.” —⁠Claira

The similarities between the life of an architect and a filmmaker aren’t hidden in The Brutalist. “We wanted to explore the shifting dynamic of a patron and an artist,” Corbet says. “What’s so complicated about making a movie is that [it] is like a kite and you give 250 people a string that they can pull on. Not only can they pull on it, but you have to for the weather.”

Corbet was born in Scottsdale, Arizona near Taliesin West, the winter home and laboratory of renowned mid-century modern architect Frank Lloyd Wright. “Some of my earliest memories were visiting my uncle who was [studying] at Taliesin West,” Corbet recalls. “Something I reference in this film is the feeling of entering a Frank Lloyd Wright house. When you enter through the front door, the ceilings are very, very low. It was a space to hang up your jacket and take off your shoes. And then when you would ascend the steps, then, bam!,” Corbet claps his hands together, “The space would crack open wide like a cathedral.”

Brutalism heralded a civil rebirth by providing a visual break from classical structures of the past. Because the material was cheap and malleable, architects played with the way concrete could curve, spiral and arch, and let light in through clever gaps to create bold statements. Toth’s use of sunlight in The Brutalist is a tantalizing feature that the film withholds from us until a devastating moment of realization.

“It’s a movie that forces me to contemplate the cost of progress and the illusion of freedom. It’s not just a story of personal survival but of the erasure and commodification of culture in a country that promises freedom but demands conformity.” —⁠Edwin

Long before this moment comes, Toth finds—like many artists working at scale with someone else’s money—his brief being altered by outside forces. The Van Buren family lawyer declares that to receive state funds, the community center must incorporate a space for Christian worship. This exposes the hypocrisy of America wrapping itself in “freedom” but “you’re really only free to do what we tell you to do,” Corbet says.

Fastvold goes further: “We wanted our character to see something that he would naturally object to because it counters his faith but as an artist he says, ‘Bring it on. I will make that. And I will make it my own and I will embed my own meaning about it that they do not need to know.’”

Yet the cuts keep coming: bookkeepers demand that the ceiling heights be lowered to reduce materials. Toth chooses to forgo his wage to keep the lofty space, refusing to explain to anyone—Erszébet included—why it matters so much.

Public art and architecture have long been lightning-rods for misinterpretation. Indeed, notes Corbet, “what’s so crazy about Brutalism is that, 75 years on, it’s so divisive. It’s weirdly become a symbol for conservatives and they’re obsessed with it. It crops up on Fox News, and definitely with Tucker Carlson, all the time.” What those commentators don’t recognize, Corbet argues, is that such an anti-Brutalist stance aligns them with the German architect Albert Speer, a Nazist government minister and close advisor of Adolf Hitler. “The promotion of neoclassical architecture as the only architecture worth making is inherently fascistic.”

Like the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce ments peppered throughout the film—touting the state as the best place in the world to work, buy a home and raise a family—radio programs heard in the background detail the foundation of the State of Israel in the aftermath of World War II. It’s here that Zsófia, mute since the concentration camps, gradually becomes an influential narrator.

“Both countries promised this hopefulness, this sort of post-war optimism, but everything turned out more complicated than that,” says Fastvold. “This is about a specific time in history: one country had seen its promise fulfilled and a new country was making new promises.”

What Zsófia recognizes is that a new home is hers to claim, and with it her family’s story—because if the artist does not articulate their own vision plainly, the meaning is open to interpretation.

This extends to the ways in which Pearce’s industrialist, Van Buren, plunders natural resources for material gain and egotistic gratification, yet is never satisfied. As the completion of their gargantuan building draws near, Van Buren and Toth travel together to an Italian marble mine run by Orazio (Salvatore Sansone), a wartime revolutionary friend of the architect’s, to select an altar piece.

Toth is relaxed in the company of Orazio as they drink coffee, climb the mountain and reminisce about the war’s traumas. Van Buren doesn’t appreciate this casual challenge to his financier-artist relationship. Following a drunken Toth into the shadows of the marble canals, the employer takes his sense of ownership over the architect a despicable step further, in a rape scene that’s filmed in a single, distant shot. The setting, featuring a large chunk taken out of the monumental mountain-face, “reflects the rapaciousness of Van Buren,” Corbet says, “a visual reminder of how his ilk devours and plunders everything in their path.”

“There is a single shot near the end of this film where Felicity Jones nearly steals the whole thing in one fell swoop. Over three hours in and I could hardly believe the build up had led to such a simplistically monstrous scene, and so much of it clicked miraculously into place for me right then.” —⁠Lucy

The film’s final confrontation was the most difficult to shoot, says Corbet, because VistaVision wasn’t meant for Steadicam operation, as the celluloid magazine is loaded horizontally and not vertically. “It starts to tip the Steadicam as film gathers on that side of the rig. So we actually had to create a counterbalance system to put it on a Steadicam, which was only successful sometimes,” Corbet laughs.

But the director says it was necessary due to the physical stunt at the heart of the scene. Having arrived at Van Buren’s mansion, interrupting yet another lavish dinner party to confront Harrison for assaulting her husband, Erzsébet’s walker is thrown aside and she’s dragged across the floor by Harry Junior (Joe Alwyn) in a shocking show of brute force.

“With [Harry] there’s this sense of entitlement,” Pearce says. “His father is more skilled at being engaging, warm, charming, winning the room, whereas poor Joe is not equipped to handle anyone that well. Him standing up for [his father] at the end brings up all sorts of questions of what our traumatic past might be together as father and son—but like all the emotional parts of the film, it’s open to interpretation.”

“We rehearsed that scene with the Steadicam and the actors for about seven hours,” Corbet recalls. “Most of the film is static imagery, because it’s necessary due to the horizontal magazine. That one we had to lift the camera and move with Felicity and there’s an inherent tension because the camera is doing something it doesn’t want to do, and for the audience the camera is doing something it hasn’t done for the entirety of a long movie.”

One moment, we’re in a frantic hunt for Van Buren that leads its search party deep into Toth’s monument; the next we are in 1980s Venice, where the architect’s now-adult niece, Zsófia (Ariane Labed), is giving a speech on behalf of her elderly, debilitated uncle, who is being honored at the Biennale Architettura.

Only then do we learn what Toth drew from for his design for Van Buren. Or, what his niece believes to be true: Zsófia asserts that the cost of the extra ceiling height was far more than its material value; the space is a reference to the expanse of the concentration camp cells that László survived.

Production designer Judy Becker took this aspect of the script wholeheartedly, says Fastvold. “Judy started by looking at architectural designs by architects who didn’t have projects completed because they died in the camps.” She also looked at the designs of the camps themselves to figure out a key part of our script which was the dual purpose of the building for László as both a way of processing his trauma and as a monument to his wife, whom he thought of [while] in the camp.” Becker’s goal was to evoke the Dachau and Buchenwald camps, but also to transform horror into something beautiful.

“Interestingly,” Fastvold concludes, “there’s no Holocaust imagery in the film. It only exists in an internal space.”

“In the end, a legacy is not just your body of work,” Corbet says. “Legacy isn’t always vast; it can be narrow and it can be [determined by] family.” We don’t know—in the epilogue, Toth can’t speak. “He’s physically present for the event, but there’s a suggestion that he’s not mentally present,” the director continues.

Brody, who already holds an Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of a man in hiding during the Nazi occupation in 2002’s The Pianist, is confident in his character’s inspirations, no matter how directly Toth may have applied them. “What is so special about this film is it illustrates how your experiences influence your work. And the traumas that László is contending with shaped the structure that is an embodiment of himself. An embodiment of his own rebuilding, and the walled-off areas and cavernous open spaces [of an artist]. There is a spiritual heart and core to this [structure]. It speaks to the traumas of what he lived through.”