Film Review: THE BRUTALIST

Adrian Brody riding a bus.

The Brutalist won its star Adrian Brody a Best Actor Oscar in 2025, and thus has topped my list of must-see movies since then. The problem was finding the time to accommodate its 3½ hours without having to stay up until dawn. Finally we made a commitment to have dinner early some evening, and last night was it. We were psyched, especially since it concerns a Jewish architect right after the war and my husband graduated with an architecture degree and we are both Jewish.

Taking my cue from the title, it was definitely a brutal 3½ hours. Also depressing, often boring, sometimes gruesome and always hard to follow as the convoluted story jumps around willy-nilly in time and place. It's chock full of sex scenes that are highly invasive, what with close-ups of pulling on penises and licking of vaginas and anal entry and even male-on-male rape. And let's not forget heroin addiction. Sound good?

Beyond that, the film's young director (and writer and producer) Brady Corbet has apparently not yet learned how to use the editing tools that are surely readily available in his field. How else to explain so many long scenes with lots of talk but nothing happens, where ridiculously inappropriate music accompanies dark, indecipherable images, and where questions are raised but never answered. For example, what the heck happened? 

On the plus side, it's a Holocaust movie but there are no scenes in death camps, no open pits full of dead Jews and no Germans, so I guess that's a win. Despite that good news, you should see it only if you are strapped onto a gurney in a hallway of an ER without access to a remote.

Now that's brutal.