The Hard Core of a Visionary Failure

On The Brutalist, or: A Blueprint for a Better Film

I decided to give The Brutalist a go the other night, despite the scathing reviews and overenthusiastic praise I had been reading, neither of which inspired confidence.

It wouldn’t be hard to explain why I didn’t like it. It’s riddled with loose ends, drags unnecessarily (I have no issue with long films, if the runtime is justified), and is overcooked in its ambition (I welcome ambition, as long as it delivers). It’s also annoyingly over-explanatory, to the point of patronizing the viewer. Do we really need an upside-down Statue of Liberty in the opening scene to foreshadow the downside of the American Dream? Do we need a verbal explanation that opium is addictive to grasp the protagonist’s struggles with the slaving habit?

But rather than listing its many flaws, I’d rather critique The Brutalist from the ruins of the good film it could have been.

Much has been said about The Brutalist’s use of VistaVision, but I can’t help but see it as fundamentally at odds with both the aesthetics and politics of Brutalism. Brady Corbet justifies the choice by saying that using a 1950s-engineered format helps immerse the viewer in that era, a valid argument if the goal were mere nostalgia. Yet Brutalism wasn’t about looking backward, quite the contrary.

Brutalism was raw, functional, and unvarnished, marked by exposed concrete, heavy massing, modular spaces, and an absence of decorative flourishes. VistaVision, on the other hand, is the complete opposite: a highly polished, immersive, hyperreal format designed to enhance visual clarity and depth, often used to capture grand, sweeping beauty with rich color and a sense of sumptuousness. It smooths out the rough edges, makes everything tonic, expansive, and like a painting.

Brutalism wasn’t about classical compositions and aesthetic perfection; it was about mass, social contradictions, and dynamic human experience. But The Brutalist turns it into a historical postcard, sanitizing its radicality. Instead of embracing Brutalism’s stark, defiant materiality, the film aestheticizes it into something detached from its political function. Soviet Constructivist cinematography – drawing from Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein – would have been a bolder choice, with its low angles, deep shadows, and exaggerated perspectives, better suited to capturing the architecture’s weight and presence rather than reducing it to an inert backdrop.

The film shows a flicker of awareness in its use of 16mm for documentary-style footage and Digital Betacam for the epilogue’s TV segment, but it never fully commits. Had it been shot in grainy, tactile, imperfect textures, it might have created a visual language that felt more like Brutalist concrete, rather than Hollywood grandeur.

Brutalism has long suffered from being misrepresented as cold, authoritarian, and oppressive, when it was the opposite: a radical response to capitalism’s failures, designed for public good, committed to communal experience and social equality. Beyond providing efficient and equitable housing with available resources, it aspired to a form of communal luxury.

As Owen Hatherley writes in Militant Modernism, British New Brutalists, like the ‘angry young’ Smithsons, working with raw materials at hand, aimed at creating architectural solutions that would unashamedly house the poor and at the same time be glamorous, ‘an architecture both of austerity and abundance, in line with the contradictions of the post-1945 melange of Socialism and Capitalism that created the post-war boom’. The Brutalist completely misunderstands this, tying Brutalism to personal trauma and aestheticized suffering, collapsing it into a story of individual grief rather than radical collective possibility.

Nowhere is this misreading more unsettling than in Tóth’s decision to model the Van Buren Institute on the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, a place designed to dehumanize and exterminate millions of human beings. Even if it were meant as a deliberate provocation, a way of forcing people to confront the painful past, it would still be unfit (to say the least) for the purposes of a community center, typically a space of refuge and social connection. Furthermore, it undermines Brutalism’s core principles, which had nothing whatsoever to do with memorializing trauma, but rather with breaking from oppressive structures and envisioning new ones. Tóth’s project isn’t an architectural response to human needs; it’s a haunted echo of past horrors, reinforcing their weight rather than transcending them.

In the final take, Brutalism is presented as a relic, displayed at the Venice Biennale, an exclusionary setting deeply embedded in the parallel universe of high-art, where architecture is preserved as spectacle rather than integrated into daily life. By the time the epilogue takes place, in the beginning of the neoliberal era, Modernist solutions in general, and Brutalism in particular, were far from being celebrated (just ask Tom Wolfe!), they were being demolished, the whole social project actively dismantled – through neglect, privatization, and political shifts away from public investment in housing and infrastructure.

If anything, the ending should have led us to ask: ‘What did we lose by abandoning these ideals? By giving up collective solutions?’ Instead, it sounds like the film just shrugs and says: ‘That’s all, folks!’

Ironically, the only scene that seems to embody Brutalist ideals isn’t about architecture at all; it’s the jazz jam session.

Among other things, Brutalism was about creating spaces for diverse communities to coexist and interact: massive residential complexes built for working-class people, communal spaces integrated into the structure itself. It embraced imperfection, roughness, and stark contrasts. It was experimental, and anti-bourgeois. Jazz, at its best, would be in a way the musical equivalent: improvisational, innovative, intense, constantly bending sonic structures, breaking through social barriers. As Jacques Attali has pointed out in Noise, by rejecting conformity to the repetitive patterns dominating the post-war cultural landscape, jazz in the late '50s and '60s paved the way for a new mode of musical production. 

The jam session scene, where marginalized communities – Black musicians, Jewish émigrés, sex workers, and drug users – come together in a liberated space, mirrors somehow the social utopian design that most Brutalist architecture aspired to. It’s beautifully raw and alive, a radically democratic realm, where differences are sublated in unfettered collective creation.

Under the spell of a Mingus-like sound, it’s the one moment where the film’s world feels alive, where people aren’t just suffering in beautifully framed shots but actually living in defiance of the oppressive structures around them. The jazz scene succeeds where the rest of the movie fails; it shows what Brutalist spaces were meant to foster, rather than mourning their supposed blunder.

The otherworldly Carrara marble quarry sequence – filmed with such craft, with the Italian partigiano’s story being told in the background – echoes the jazz scene in its poetic and political intensity, creating a moment of solidarity between the wretched – the Jewish architect and the anti-fascist anarchist artisan – both negatively shaped by the experience of the war. The quarry, already a site heavy with symbolism (extraction, exploitation, brutal labor conditions), becomes for a minute almost an allegory of an alter world. The scene suggests a possible counterpoint to the film’s broader narrative of manipulation and sorrow; a moment in which creation, resistance, and lived experience align in an act of shared defiance and beauty.

But then, this is bluntly shattered by an act of sexual abuse, a narrative misstep that weakens the film’s own critique. If we think about its storyline economy, what each scene contributes to the whole, the scene feels gratuitous rather than revelatory. If the goal was to show Tóth’s breaking point, hadn’t his years of psychological and economic subjugation under the patronage of Van Buren already established that? Instead of letting the political weight of the scene breathe, the film forces a moral collapse, as if it didn’t trust us to grasp Tóth’s suffering unless it’s pushed to the extreme.

The free-association between the ideas of Brutalism and brutality was already advanced and explored – way more successful if I may add – more than 50 years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, filmed partially at the Southmere Estate in Thamesmead. In The Brutalist, however, it doesn’t add depth but reduces the complexity of power and coercion to another victimization trope.

The film had already built an effective critique of how power operates subtly, through favor, economic dependence, and artistic compromise in a capitalist society, but by inserting this sudden physical brutality, it shifts focus away from those more insidious, systemic forces.

Had the director trusted the strength of scenes like the jazz jam and the quarry sequence to carry their own weight, it could have provided a radical counterpoint to Van Buren’s world – the world of privilege, narcissism, and exceptionalism of the ultra-rich – a glimpse of what art, labor, and solidarity might look like outside the logic of profit and exploitation. Instead, the intrusion of sexual violence collapses those possibilities, reducing moments of potential dissent into yet another iteration of victimhood and suffering.

Even worse: instead of confronting the master, the offended, tellingly, turns against his fellow exploited, including Gordon, the Black co-worker he befriended at the start of his American journey, and who vanishes from the screen just as inexplicably as Van Buren at the end.

At its best, The Brutalist had the potential to explore the tension between artistic vision and capitalist patronage, between radical architecture and its later misinterpretation. But instead of engaging with these contradictions, it romanticizes, aestheticizes, and ultimately misunderstands its own subject, painting Brutalism as mere historical relic, in lieu of a political statement, a vision of the future that never came to be. The movie doesn't challenge the neoliberal erasure of that alternative future; it accepts it rather, as if it were inevitable. And that, more than anything, is its greatest failure.