Editor’s note: The following story contains references to sexual assault. To reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org.

Brady Corbet, an actor turned writer/director, has rarely indulged in subtlety. In case the viewer doesn’t understand the criticism of American culture that persuades artists to commodify their pain Vox Lux (2018), a voiceover at the end reveals that the pop star main character had a near-death vision and made a deal with the devil. A similarly blunt visual metaphor dominates the opening of Corbet’s latest, The brutalist (2024). As Hungarian Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) climbs onto the deck of the boat taking him to the United States, both Daniel Blumberg’s score and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camerawork become increasingly chaotic, culminating in a shaky, on Upside down image of the Statue of Liberty. Maybe the American dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?

The brutalist has great designs. It is the first feature film in decades to be shot in VistaVision, the film format used for old-school epics such as: B. is used The Ten Commandments (1956). The film will be exhibited in 70mm prints at select locations throughout its theatrical run, and its 215-minute running time includes an intermission separating the two individually titled acts (“The Enigma of Arrival” and “The Hard Core of Beauty,” respectively). . The story is about László, an architect who struggles for many years to complete his project Main worka mixed-use community center in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. He constantly clashes with his wealthy backer Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and, along with his wife (Felicity Jones), another survivor, struggles to bury her lingering trauma.

The film’s tropes about the alienation of immigration, the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish-American experience, and tensions between artists and patrons are all familiar, if not well-worn. It’s frustrating that the film can’t always trust the audience; Most ridiculously, there is a rape scene in which the attacker’s words to the victim make the symbolic meaning of the attack clear.

Still, Corbet finds ways to reexamine some of these ideas. This is perhaps best exemplified by Blumberg’s score, which is both grandiose and contradictory, recalling the work of Corbet’s former collaborator Scott Walker, to whom the film is dedicated. And using a retro celluloid process isn’t vanity; VistaVision’s wide field of view is suitable for a film so concerned with people in spaces in general and architecture in particular. The tones of the footage do the most work of any individual element to convincingly transport the audience into the story’s mid-century setting. One sequence overlooks a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy, with a majestic sweep that is rightly awe-inspiring on the big screen.

The screenplay by Corbet and Mona Fastvold is particularly interesting for those interested in art history and architecture. It also deals with brutalism and its emotional values. In the dance between a camera and built spaces, Brutalism, with its emphasis on monochrome, its pronounced angles and curves, and of course the sheer size of many of its public works, offers endless possibilities. Historically, cinema has relied on imposing brutalist buildings as easy shorthand for villainy. Real brutalist buildings and fictional brutalist-style buildings are the backdrops for dystopias, overwhelming bureaucracies and/or simply impersonal institutions in films, starting with Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation The process (1962) to A Clockwork Orange (1971) to 1984 (1984) to balance (2002) and many, many more. The poster for Frederick Wiseman’s documentary City hall (2020), set in Boston’s controversial brutalist civic center, draws on the familiar Jaw (1975) poster, with one corner of the building taking the shark’s place.

While brutalism isn’t exactly scary, filmmakers believe its expressive qualities lend themselves well to an eerie, if not downright alien, effect. High-rise building (2015), an adaptation of the novel of the same name about the collapse of society in an isolated apartment complex, echoes JG Ballard’s description of five towers that look like fingers reaching for the sky as brutalist structures. “It looks like the subconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event,” says a character. In Last and first man (2020), the brutalist spomenik War memorials of the former Yugoslavia represent humanity from billions of years in the future. In the brutalist, László envisions his community center as an example of the proletarian spirit of brutalism, linking its intended function in the region to its size. Van Buren, for his part, is simply awed by the enormity of the form and cares only that the building is a fitting memorial to himself and his adored late mother, bolstering his ego.

All of these philosophies are expressed without the words “Brutalism” or “Brutalist” ever actually being spoken in the film, and with minimal explicit discussion of László’s philosophy or reasoning. (Although, if you want to be precise, the furniture he designs in the first hour of the film is more generally modernist than brutalist.) At the end of the film, another possible meaning is hinted at by his work, in the form of his blueprint as a very literal expression postulating his time in the concentration camp. The validity of this interpretation is left to the viewer. The larger point, echoing Shelley’s Ozymandias (1977), is that an artist, regardless of intent, is helpless to influence the shape of his legacy. “No matter what others try to sell you,” says a character in the film’s haunting final line, “it’s the destination, not the journey.”

The brutalist (2024), directed by Brady Corbet, is in theaters nationwide starting December 20th.