From 2018 to 2022, I sold movie tickets and mountainous bags of popcorn at Cinema 21 in Portland, Oregon. I didn’t always watch the movies that played there, but I always heard them—especially “Vox Lux” (2018), which begins with pounding gunfire and ends with a pop star’s siren song.
“Vox Lux” stars Natalie Portman as Celeste, a singer who survived a school shooting as a child. Her story was framed as a meditation on the symbiosis of tragedy and pop culture, but director Brady Corbet reduced the trauma endured by survivors of gun violence to a superficial plot point, getting so high on his own ambition that he suffocated any possibility of empathy or emotion.
I hated watching “Vox Lux”—and when I worked at Cinema 21, I hated hearing it even more (the sounds of simulated gun deaths inevitably recalled the massacre at the Century 16 theater in Aurora, Colorado). It is one of the most callous and pretentious films I have ever seen, and for a long time, I believed I could never enjoy anything Corbet touched.
Like many movie buffs, I tend to define myself based on what I love and loathe, but art is allergic to partisan divides. No matter how religiously you cling to your passions and prejudices, there is always the possibility that the director you decry today will be the director you defend tomorrow.
That reality sunk in as I bore witness to Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which stars Adrien Brody as Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, who survives the Holocuast and immigrates to Pennsylvania. As directorial shifts go, it is one of the starkest since Steve McQueen segued from the sleek despair of “Shame” (2011) to the horrors and hopes of “12 Years a Slave” (2013).
“McQueen has opened himself up to society, history, and narrative,” David Denby wrote in The New Yorker after seeing “12 Years.” Corbet has done the same, embracing the society of postwar Pennsylvania, the history of the Jewish diaspora, and László’s personal narrative of immigration and assimilation.
That narrative begins in the bowels of a great ship, with László lost in a shadowy crowd. As he emerges into muted daylight, the camera swings toward the Statue of Liberty, promptly flipping upside down—a brilliantly obvious foreshadowing of László’s soon-to-be capsized American dreams.

When a young man arrived in the Land of Opportunity in Elia Kazan’s “America America,” he kissed the ground in gratitude. In an amusing sign of how cinema has changed since 1963, László’s first order of business is to visit a brothel, where a sex worker mocks his broken nose (which he sustained by leaping from a train and colliding with a tree branch).
“Your face is ugly,” she tells László. “I know it is,” he replies. László is deferential to a fault, but his humility starts to evaporate when self-mythologizing industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) hires him to design a community center in honor of his late mother.
“It is no coincidence that fate brought us together on the eve of my mother’s death!” Harrison grandly declares, though the community center isn’t born of a son’s love. It’s born of Harrison’s desire to conquer the landscape with his money—and László’s desire to conquer it with his art.
With a theater, a library, a gymnasium, and a chapel, the community center promises to be all things to all people (or at least all things to all artistic, bookish, athletic Christians). “Don’t let it drive you mad,” warns Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), László’s wife.
By the time László is designing a window that will corral the sunlight into the shape of a cross, it is too late. Determined to leave his masculine mark upon the earth, he neglects Erzsébet, who, in the wake of the war, is malnourished, stricken with osteoporosis, and confined to a wheelchair—a living memory of the genocide she and László endured and escaped.
With one foot planted in the New World and another reaching toward the Old, “The Brutalist” plays like “There Will Be Blood” (2007) with a passport. Even as László molds his identity to fit the confines of America’s borders, he hungers for Europe, most palpably when he and Harrison go on an exquisite sojourn to an Italian quarry.
Early in “The Brutalist,” Harrison proprietarily tells László, “I’ve found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating.” The quarry silences their intellectual banter, forcing them to submit to the serenity of the pale rocks that surround them.
Soon, that serenity is stained by an unforgivable act László endures at the hands of his patron. Pearce’s crusty charisma makes Harrison seductive, but the character’s love of racial slurs turns out to be a prelude to his passion for physical violence, which cinematographer Lol Crawley films in chillingly matter-of-fact fashion.
Erzsébet does not witness Harrison’s crime, but in a previous scene, she tells László, “I know everything that has happened to you.” A seemingly mystical connection unites the couple—and rouses Erzsébet to chivalrously defend her husband from Harrison’s bigoted, capitalistic wrath.

In the wake of Erzsébet and Harrison’s cathartic clash, “The Brutalist” doesn’t know what to do with itself. Should it finish the symphony of László’s life on an artfully ambiguous note? Or bludgeon us with a crescendo of weighty themes?
Unable to decide, Corbet tries to have it both ways. At once overthought and undercooked, the final scenes are so spectacularly misjudged that I half wonder if they’re bad on purpose—a flourish of evasive banality calculated to illuminate the greatness of what came before.
And what comes before is great. It turns out that the tornado of talking points swirling around “The Brutalist”—it was shot on VistaVision film! It has an intermission! It’s three-and-a-half hours long!—is less interesting than the simultaneous importance and irrelevance of its themes.
I could tell you that “The Brutalist” is a film about how the American Dream is an insidious lie at best and a sadistic joke at worst—the punchline being that fantasies of a more perfect union trick citizens into accepting a very perfect dystopia.
I could also tell you that “The Brutalist” defies both the definitions moviegoers will likely impose upon it and its ideas about itself. The movie has plenty to say about identity, nationality, and destiny, but it’s more than what it says.
“The Brutalist” is László standing in a newly built library, basking in his mastery of the space. It’s Harrison pressing his cheek against a quarry wall, savoring the ghostly touch of rock. It’s Erzsébet denouncing Harrison as “an evil rapist,” exuding a righteousness that will be denied, but never forgotten.
I can’t wait to see those moments again—and listen to them. “The Brutalist” is one Brady Corbet film that I want to hear.