To give credit where credit is due: director Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024) is a technical achievement. The scope and evident ambition of the over-three-hour-long film barely betray its breakneck shoot (34 days) and minuscule budget ($10M). Considering these facts, its sheer existence is a miracle. Nonetheless, for all its gestures toward monumental statement, they are often as meaningful as a circus strongman’s flexing. Zionism, racism, drug abuse, sexual assault, the subjection of artistic expression to capital, the history of architecture, postwar European reconstruction, and trauma are just a few of the heavyweights it juggles – with consistency, if not dexterity.

“Attempts at redemption take the form of art”

The film centres on László Toth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor (played earnestly by Adrien Brody) who immigrates to the United States and fights to actualise his architectural ambitions, contending with poverty, antisemitism, and the whims of his ultra-rich patron Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). The film’s core can be expressed in simple terms: there is a doubleness at the heart of all acts of creation — a dialectic between birth and destruction. Trauma destroys the soul, and attempts at redemption take the form of art. The artist creates but also destroys himself and those around him (he is invariably a man). Faced with antisemitism, Toth’s family considers moving to Israel. The creation of the Zionist state ostensibly promises a new hope to the dispossessed, but is in turn founded upon profound violence to the Palestinian people (though the film never dares to confront this pressing, all-too-timely fact directly).

This is all fine, if not particularly new or edifying. Where the film fails is in its inability to think through these issues with conviction, depth, and humanity. The character of Toth rarely appears more than a conceptual sum total of these thematic burdens. Neither is his wife, played by Felicity Jones (except in one late, crucial scene), usually more than what her label implies. Indeed, there is much that one can point to and name in the film, — labels, weighty themes, the occasional striking image — but very little in between. The ineffable, the human, and the space enclosed by that concrete thematic architecture buttressing the film’s sense of its own importance, is lacking.

Sexual ecstasy is also abjection (sex is never framed in this film as anything but fundamentally violent). A baffling scene in the second half involving sexual violence, which I will not spoil, exemplifies this. It is so inhumanly cynical in its cruel metaphorical heavy-handedness (even for the script’s standards) that the film never really recovers. Perhaps what is most disappointing is the film’s lack of meaningful commentary on architecture itself. Narratively, the implied equation between brutalist architecture and the ego of the lone male visionary, though implicitly critiqued, feels reductive. Two of the most famous Brutalist practices were led by husband-and-wife teams: Alison and Peter Smithson (who helped coin the term) and Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. In an interview, the film’s editor David Jancsó claimed that brutalism influenced the film’s visual language: “the clean, geometric precision of brutalist architecture influenced the cutting patterns, with long, unbroken shots interspersed with sharp, abrupt cuts.” This would all be very well if architecture were about time. Unfortunately, architecture is primarily an art of space.

Considering its subject matter, The Brutalist is strangely uninterested in cinematic space: we rarely inhabit the frames Jancsó splices together. The analogue VistaVision format, a gimmick from the 1950s used here, allows for large expanses in the frame. Yet Corbet seems more interested in achieving claustrophobic effects. His visuals, while often well-composed, tend to subsist on the image surface.

“Architecture is, fundamentally, a humanist endeavour”

Symptomatic of the film’s failure to craft a sense of space is the way its central location — the Van Buren manor — never coheres into a lived-in place, though much of the story unfolds there. The America from which Toth is alienated hardly makes itself felt at all (the film was shot in Hungary). Budget constraints account for this, but cannot excuse a lack of formal imagination. Most confusing of all is the depiction of Toth’s most important building: the community centre Van Buren commissions him to design. From conception to completion, we see only the building’s stark, forbidding exterior. Toth alludes to grand conceptions and vaguely describes an arrangement of its interior space, combining a chapel, a library, an auditorium, and a gymnasium. We glimpse some disconnected sketches. The climax of the film enters these discrete spaces, but the precise ways these interiors are connected — how space is sculpted and programmed — is never depicted.

This omission seems a provocation: an attempt to register the sublime irrepresentability of Toth’s megalomaniac construction. The effect, however, is bathetic. The building is rendered not profoundly incomprehensible but small and incoherent: an apt analogy for the film’s construction, composed of many weighty elements that ultimately fail to coalesce.

Architecture is, fundamentally, a humanist endeavour. At its best, brutalism takes seriously the promise of new materials and technologies to shape immense spaces, harnesses its power to bring people together, and dangerously dares to imagine new ways of organising space to promote human flourishing. The Brutalist fails to grapple with the true ambition and danger of its subject matter because of its lack of attention to real people and their relationships, a sensitivity to which is the mark of all successful architecture. The film’s insensitivity even renders its potentially provocative pairing of the Zionist project and postwar architecture cynical, opportunistic, and false.

Meanwhile, that The Brutalist’s production team covertly and unapologetically used AI to generate Toth’s architectural designs (presented as the work of a genius) and to smooth over imperfections in the actors’ Hungarian accents, is surely evidence of a fundamental ambivalence towards the place of humanity in the work of art. That Louis Kahn used “conversation” as a metaphor for the relationships between his buildings’ spaces is no accident. The Brutalist may be a monument to its own ambition, but the space within is empty.