A co-production between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hungary,[8]The Brutalist premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on September 1, 2024, where Corbet was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Direction. It was officially released in the United States by A24 on December 20, 2024; in Hungary by UIP-DunaFilm on January 23, 2025; and in the United Kingdom by Focus Features through Universal Pictures International on January 24, 2025.
In 1947, László travels to Philadelphia, where he stays with his cousin, Attila, and Attila's wife, Audrey, while he looks for work. Attila reveals to a relieved László that Erzsébet and Zsófia are still alive but stuck in Europe. Although Attila offers him work with his furniture business, László is relegated to using a makeshift bedroom and a service bathroom. He discovers that Attila has assimilated into American culture, anglicizing his name and converting to Catholicism to marry Audrey. They are soon approached by Harry Lee Van Buren, who wishes to surprise his father, wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, with a renovated library at his mansion near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Following a drunken night of merriment, Audrey expresses her disdain for László and suggests he lives elsewhere. Back at the mansion, Harrison arrives home early, is enraged at the surprise renovation, and fires the men; Harry refuses to pay them their fee. Attila demands that László leave their home, blaming him for the failed project and falsely accusing him of having made a pass at his wife.
Three years later, László, now a heroin addict, works as a laborer loading coal and lives in charity housing with Gordon, an African-American single father László befriended soon after immigrating. Harrison turns up to tell him the architectural community has lauded his modern library renovation, and that he has researched his past and discovered that László was an accomplished architect in Europe. He pays the money owed to László — which László and Gordon later spend on heroin — and invites László to a party in his honor, where he commissions him to construct a grand project in tribute to Harrison's late mother: The Van Buren Institute, a community center comprising a library, theater, gymnasium, and a chapel. Work begins immediately with László living and working on site and employing Gordon. Harrison introduces László to his personal lawyer, who expedites the immigration of László's wife and niece.
Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty
In 1953, László reunites with Erzsébet and Zsófia and discovers that due to their wartime suffering, Erzsébet is confined to a wheelchair from osteoporosis caused by famine, and Zsófia is unable to speak. During construction, László clashes with contractors and consultants hired by Harrison, who depart from his design in an attempt to stay on budget. He agrees to work unpaid to make up for additional costs. Harry derides László as being merely "tolerated" and makes lewd remarks about Zsófia. László warns Zsófia to avoid Harry. Following the derailment of a train carrying materials and ensuing legal costs, a furious Harrison abandons the project and fires the workers.
In 1958, László and Erzsébet have moved to New York City, where he works as a drafter at an architecture firm, and she writes for a newspaper. Zsófia, who recovered her ability to speak, is expecting a child with her husband, Binyamin. They announce they are making Aliyah and moving to Jerusalem, much to the chagrin of László and Erzsébet. Harrison restarts the project and rehires László.
While visiting the mines of Carrara to purchase marble, Harrison rapes an intoxicated László, calling him a societal leech whose people invite their own persecution. Back on site, an increasingly traumatized László begins to unravel, becoming more belligerent and impulsively firing his crew and Gordon during an argument. Referencing Harry's and Audrey's prior contempt, he laments to Erzsébet that they are not welcome in America. After László almost kills Erzsébet by giving her heroin to soothe her pain from endometriosis, she proposes they live in Jerusalem with Zsófia and her family, to which he agrees. Shortly afterwards, Erzsébet, now using a walker instead of a wheelchair, visits Harrison at his home and calls him a rapist in front of his family and associates. An enraged Harry violently pushes her out, before his sister Maggie intervenes and helps her to her taxi. Unable to find his father, Harry organizes a search party and tries to locate him within The Institute, albeit with his fate ultimately left unclear, as an illuminated cross in the building shines upside down.
Epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale
In 1980, Erzsébet has died, and a retrospective of László's work is held at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The exhibition showcases various projects built across the United States during the ensuing years and includes The Van Buren Institute, finally completed after a decade's hiatus. Zsófia, accompanied by her young adult daughter and an aging László, gives a speech highlighting how László designed the structure to resemble the concentration camps that imprisoned the Tóths, and functions as a way of processing trauma. She ends by claiming that László once told her: "No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey."
Guy Pearce as Harrison Lee Van Buren, a wealthy, handsome, snobbish industrialist who becomes László's primary client, but is envious of his artistic creativity
Joe Alwyn as Harry Lee Van Buren, Harrison's entitled and pompous son
Raffey Cassidy as Zsófia, László's orphaned teenage niece, who has become mute after surviving the Holocaust, also at Dachau
Cassidy also briefly as Zsófia's young adult daughter
In September 2018, Deadline reported that director Brady Corbet had chosen the period drama The Brutalist as his next project following the world premiere of his second feature film, Vox Lux.[12] New York-based Andrew Lauren Productions (ALP) developed the screenplay with Corbet and financed the film.[12] Corbet co-wrote the screenplay with his partner Mona Fastvold, with whom he co-wrote the 2015 film The Childhood of a Leader and the 2018 film Vox Lux.[13] The film was originally announced as a co-production between Andrew Lauren and D.J. Gugenheim for ALP, Trevor Matthews and Nick Gordon for Brookstreet Pictures,[14] Brian Young's Three Six Zero,[12] and the Polish company Madants,[15][16] and executive produced by Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, and David Hinojosa of Killer Films.[14]
Lol Crawley discussing The Brutalist at the 2025 IFFR
Director of photography Lol Crawley, editor Dávid Jancsó, and costume designer Kate Forbes were announced on March 9, 2023.[21][22] Production designer Judy Becker was announced on April 11, 2023.[8]Daniel Blumberg composed the film's score.[23]
On April 11, 2023, it was announced that Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Jonathan Hyde, Emma Laird, and Peter Polycarpou would star in the film, while Edgerton, Cotillard, Rylance, Stan, and Kirby were no longer attached.[8] It was also announced that the film would be co-produced by the US-based companies Andrew Lauren Productions and Yellow Bear along with the United Kingdom's Brookstreet and Intake Films, and Hungary's Proton Cinema,[8] and financed by Brookstreet UK, Yellow Bear, Lip Sync Productions, Richmond Pictures, Meyohas Studio, Carte Blanche, Cofiloisirs, and Parable Media.[8] CAA Media Finance handles US sales with Protagonist Pictures handling international sales.[8]Focus Features subsequently acquired international distribution rights to the film.[4]
Filming
Filming was originally set to start in 2020,[24] but it was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[24] It was then scheduled to start in January 2021,[17] but it was postponed to August 2021,[25] only to be delayed to the second quarter of 2022.[24] Corbet said filming was postponed several times due to the pandemic as well as several pregnancies and deaths in the families of the film's cast and crew.[26]
After several delays, filming finally began in Budapest,[27][8] Hungary, on March 16, 2023.[28] Production then moved to Carrara, Tuscany, on April 29, 2023,[29][30] and was completed on May 5, 2023.[31]
The film was shot using the VistaVision process and cameras that involves shooting horizontally on 35mm film stock, which was then scanned, with the intention of also making prints for a 70mm film release, which has the same height and was the most practical format to show the original size of the VistaVision frame when projecting film.[32] Corbet explained the choice of VistaVision was also aesthetic: "It just seemed like the best way to access that period (1950s) was to shoot on something that was engineered in that same decade." The film is presented in two acts with a 15-minute intermission, plus an epilogue.[33]
The film's score was composed by English musician Daniel Blumberg, who had previously worked with Corbet on the short film Gyuto (2019). The two worked together on the film over a span of seven years.[34][35] The album containing the score was released through Milan Records on December 13, 2024.[35] Blumberg and Corbet wanted continuous music for the film's first 10 minutes, resulting in the opening sequence of The Brutalist being choreographed and shot to Blumberg's demos.[34] The overture features pianists John Tilbury, Sophie Agnel[fr], and Simon Sieger, trumpeter Axel Dörner, and saxophonist Evan Parker, all of whom appear throughout the soundtrack.[34] Synth-pop musician Vince Clarke plays the synthesizer on "Epilogue (Venice)".[35]
The experimental "Construction" was the first track Blumberg wrote for the score; an early demo was composed on a prepared piano at London's Cafe Oto to create a sound similar to construction noises.[35] "Erzsébet", one of the score's themes, was played by Blumberg live on a piano since Corbet wanted the actors to hear the music while shooting; the train noises from the scene were eventually incorporated into the track's final version.[35]
Post-production and AI controversy
Editing was completed by Hungarian editor Dávid Jancsó.[36] In an interview with RedShark News, Jancsó revealed that artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Respeecher, a Ukrainian software company, were deployed in order to improve the authenticity of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones's Hungarian dialogue.[37] Both actors received dialect coaching, but the filmmakers wanted to perfect their pronunciation "so that not even locals will spot any difference."[37] Unsuccessful ADR work prompted them to record Brody and Jones's voices into Respeecher; Jancsó, a native Hungarian speaker, also fed in his voice to "finesse the tricky dialect".[37]
[Brody] and [Jones]'s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of [Brody] and [Jones]'s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.
Additionally, it was claimed that generative artificial intelligence was used to conjure a series of architectural blueprints and finished buildings in the film's closing sequence.[37] In a 2022 Filmmaker article, production designer Judy Becker claimed the film's architecture consultant used Midjourney "to create three brutalist buildings quite quickly."[40] However, Corbet denied this in a subsequent interview: "Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists. To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980."[41] The director concluded by saying "The Brutalist is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here."[38]
It was screened in IMAX theaters two days prior to its limited theatrical release for New York and Los Angeles before being screened in IMAX nationwide throughout January.
The Brutalist made $266,791 from four theaters in the US in its opening weekend, and then $211,164 in its second weekend and $244,341 in its third.[53] In its fourth weekend, the film expanded to 68 theaters and made $1.38 million. Its figure was noted as outperforming Better Man, which made $1.1 million from 1,291 theaters over the same frame.[54][55] The following weekend it grossed $2 million from 338 theaters (and a total of $2.4 million over the four-day MLK holiday).[56] After earning 10 Oscar nominations, the film expanded to 1,118 theaters, and made $2.9 million over the weekend.[57] The film has grossed a total of $41.4 million worldwide.[3]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 314 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.7/10.The website's consensus reads: "Structurally beautiful and suffused with Adrien Brody's soulful performance, writer-director Brady Corbet's immaculately designed The Brutalist is a towering tribute to the immigrant experience."[58]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 90 out of 100, based on 57 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[59]
The film received a five-star review from The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who called it "an amazing and engrossing epic". He continued: "The Brutalist obviously takes something from Ayn Rand, but also from Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow in its depiction of the US immigrant adventure and the promise of success – but maybe Corbet and Fastvold go further and faster into how dizzyingly sensual and sexual it all is". Bradshaw concluded: "It is an electrifying piece of work, stunningly shot by cinematographer Lol Crawley and superbly designed by Judy Becker. I emerged from this movie light-headed and euphoric, dizzy with rubbernecking at its monumental vastness."[60] In a review for Vogue, the cinematography, score, costumes, and production design were described as "sumptuous", "impressively stylish", and possessing a "staggering ambition".[61] Some reviews criticized the film, including The Ringer's Adam Nayman[62] and The New Yorker's Richard Brody, with the latter writing that "Brady Corbet's epic takes on weighty themes, but fails to infuse its characters with the stuff of life."[63]
↑ "Q&A with Brady Corbet". Le Cinéma Club (Interview). December 20, 2024. Archived from the original on December 22, 2024. Retrieved February 2, 2025. on a budget of 9.6 million dollars
↑ "The Sync Report | Brady Corbet". audioboom.com. August 11, 2022. Archived from the original on February 8, 2023. Retrieved March 21, 2023. Corbet starts talking about The Brutalist at the 1:11:48 mark.
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