The Brutalist

László Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect, survives the Holocaust and flees to the US, while his family gets stranded in Europe. An encounter with Mr. Van Buren (Guy Pierce), a wealthy American man passionate about art, gives László an opportunity to rebuild his life overseas but gradually turns into just another night-mare, one with Faustian-Mephistopheles undertones. In THE BRUTALIST, the grandeur of Brady Corbet’s style reaches a sort of crescendo almost unseen in contemporary cinema. A work of enormous scale, energy and narrative as well as conceptual freedom, it recalls iconic films of the 20th century, ranging from the opera-like, decadent anti-fascist frescoes of Luchino Visconti to the vital, yet disillusioned realism of New Hollywood and its tour-de-force per-formances. 20th century (film) culture often managed to turn the experience of Holocaust and the reality of the post-war world into a perhaps too-familiar therapeutic fiction. Yet Corbet challenges this part of the canon, bringing the fictional story of a fictional László Toth back to the disturbing, visceral real, a place of continuous pain and anxiety where no traumas can be healed and no tragedies can be redeemed. (Evgeny Gusyatinskiy) 

Brady Corbet:  PROTECT YOU + ME (2008, K), CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER (2015), VOX LUX (2018)