Having won a slew of awards at the Golden Globes, The Brutalist is now the one to beat at the Oscars. It’s pretty extraordinary for a film that doesn’t exactly set out to please: three and a half hours about a fictional architect of the eternally unfashionable Brutalist school, and themes about the perennial struggle between art and commerce against a backdrop of Holocaust trauma.
What this epic does have—as well as the trailblazing success of the equally long and heavy Oppenheimer—is a towering performance from past Oscar-winner Adrien Brody and direction from rising auteur Brady Corbet, whose decision to film in the expansive widescreen VistaVision format makes his film an Undeniable Experience.
The Brutalist focuses on the career of fictional Hungarian architect László Toth (Brody), who arrives in America with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) after a war spent in the concentration camps. There, he is taken under the wing of industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who commissions him to create a vast Institute bearing the Van Buren name. A struggle for control between artist and capitalist ensues, with dramatic consequences that equal the scale of Toth’s proposed building.
Visually, this is a film that denies its relatively tiny budget, as ambitious and as grand as the creations of its central character. To achieve this, Corbet struggled through the Covid pandemic and several postponements, using a team capable of realizing his vision on screen against the odds in just the same way as Toth’s struggle to build his masterpiece.
Budapest, Hungary
Although most of the action in The Brutalist is set in the United States, almost all filming, in fact, took place in Hungary. Budapest’s sound stages have become a go-to for movies of all sizes in recent years, offering a combination of facilities, experienced film-making teams and the all-important tax incentives. Both films in the Dune saga were shot there, as were the recent critical hits Maria and Poor Things, along with blockbusters Alien: Romulus and the forthcoming Brad Pitt vehicle F1.
For The Brutalist, Budapest was a necessity. As the film’s production designer, Judy Becker, told Elle Decor, “You get a lot more for your money in Eastern Europe. It’s the only place the movie could have been done.” This was as much about finding a backdrop that looked like 1950s America as it was about making use of studios, with three months of location-hunting taking place around the city before filming began.