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The Brutalist Movie Review

The Brutalist is a 2024 epic period drama film directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones. It’s a very boring, overrated movie.

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“This whole country is rotten“

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It is about a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States, where he struggles to achieve the American Dream until a wealthy client changes his life. This movie was nominated for ten Academy Awards and is frequently regarded as one of the best films of the year. I found it to be quite weak myself. It’s not only the most overrated movie of 2024, but also the most boring film of the entire year.

I am getting sick and tired of these same old American Dream immigrant experience stories, Jewish suffering and the same old plots set in and/or immediately after WWII. Everything about this movie felt carefully orchestrated to elicit the best possible response from not just critics, but awards bodies especially, which paid off nicely, proving once again how predictable all of these awards are. It’s by far the biggest Oscar-bait film in years.

There is no denying the The Brutalist works as a technical achievement. The cinematography is quite strong with a couple of shots being very memorable and effective. The score is especially terrific and sweeping in its quality. The overall production design also worked and I did like the inclusion of intermission and overture, making it feel like a classic film from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

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With that being said, these technical achievements could not save the movie from being not just an utter bore, but also an overly simple and uninteresting story filled with characters for whom I never cared about in the slightest. The technicalities would need to be mind-blowing for me to forgive the film for its major flaws, and they simply weren’t as outstanding.

I have never been a fan of Adrien Brody and I find it especially frustrating that he would get all these glowing reviews for pretty much repeating his ‘Pianist’ role from all those years ago. Laszlo Toth is a boring character who is also quite unlikable at times and I simply failed to connect with his story. He was the least interesting character in a film that was supposed to be his. This is a regular immigrant story that failed to distinguish itself from numerous others of its ilk.

The other two cast members fared better. They were more memorable and more interesting to me. It’s a shame that they ruined the character by introducing that unnecessary rape sequence, but everything before that worked when it comes to Guy Pearce’s Harrison. Pearce delivered a charismatic performance and a believable accent for the period and his scenes were all quite memorable. As for Felicity Jones, her character was typical for this type of story, but she elevated the pedestrian role with a very strong performance. These two both managed to steal the movie from Brody, which was a huge hurdle that the film never overcame.

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There is artificiality to this movie that left me feeling cold. That austere tone was quite irritating. The pacing is horrendous as well. There was no need for this rather simple story to last for more than two hours, let alone three. Thus, a lot of unnecessary padding was included. Also, for a story about architecture, I did not see much architecture in the final product. The dialogue is fine, though not great and the emotional investment is non-existent. Brady Corbet is a fine director when it comes to the technical aspects, but he failed to write an actually good screenplay.