The Brutalist review: 'confirms Brady Corbet's arrival as major American filmmaker'

Presence (15) ★★★★☆

The first properly striking image in Brady Corbet’s period epic The Brutalist is an abstract, shaky, upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty. We’re seeing it through the eyes of the main character, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect arriving in America by boat in 1947. Emerging from the darkness below deck, he may be one of the poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but his first view of Lady Liberty is a portent of things to come: over the next 215 minutes, Corbet — working from an original script co-written with Mona Fastvold — sets out to explore in audacious, exacting, sometimes funny, sometimes savage ways not only the extent to which the reality of the immigrant experience of post-war America is an inversion of the country’s idea of itself, but also how those deceptive foundations have led to the construction of something monstrous.

Just as Francis Ford Coppola had the corruption of the American Dream in his sights with the ironic first line of The Godfather (“I believe in America”), Corbet is up front about his film’s grand themes, deliberately drawing attention to them with his ostentatious approach. Despite a minimal budget (reportedly $10 million), Corbet shot The Brutalist using VistaVision, a rarely used widescreen celluloid format, and he presents it like Lawrence of Arabia with an overture, an epilogue and a built-in intermission that splits its decades-spanning story into two distinct parts.

There’s also something of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and The Master in The Brutalist, both in the film’s lush score (the composer is Daniel Blumberg) and in the way Corbet uses the twisted, masochistic relationship that his main character forms with another man as a prism through which to explore ideas about America. That man is Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a WASPish Philadelphian tycoon whose library László and his furniture-store-owning cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) have been hired to renovate. Their first meeting does not go well, but Van Buren gradually comes to learn that László, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, was formerly an architect of some renown, a Bauhaus-trained artist whose brutalist buildings survived the devastation of the war and in whose artistic glory Van Buren now wants to bask.

Commissioning him to build a grand institute on top of a nearby hill that will serve as both a tribute to his late mother and a community centre for the Protestant locals, Van Buren’s patrician-style benevolence masks some deep-rooted prejudices that gradually come to the fore as László’s singular vision and obsessive attention to detail make the build a more complex and expensive process than anticipated, one further complicated by László’s ongoing heroin addiction and the subsequent arrival in American of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and their mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).

There’s a lot to unpack here and Corbet weaves in some provocative ideas about sex and sexuality, poverty and shame, wealth and pride, identity and history, and the intersection of race, religion and capitalism, all of them forcing us to repeatedly question to whom (or what) the brutalist of the title is referring: is it László? His architectural style? Van Buren? America?

The performances are uniformly great, with Brody especially haunting as László, whose artistic inspirations Corbet reveals in the film’s final moments to gut-punching effect. Pearce, meanwhile, is strange, sinister and, intentionally, a little ridiculous as Van Buren. His is an entertainingly outsized performance, but it’s Corbet’s show. Having previously made Childhood of a Leader and followed it up with the excellent Vox Lux, his ability in The Brutalist to embrace his budget limitations to create astonishing images and chip away at big ideas in original and uncompromising ways confirms the former actor’s arrival as major American filmmaker.

Is there a more mercurial director than Steven Soderbergh? The restless spirit behind Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven and Magic Mike returns with horror film Presence, a ghost story that lets him experiment in a genre he last dipped his toe in with the shot-on-an-iPhone paranoid thriller Unsane. As with that film, his approach is a large part of the appeal. Taking the familiar horror-movie conceit of having unexplained paranormal activity stress-test a nuclear family navigating various marital, work and personal issues, he flips this trope on its head by using his camera subjectively to present everything from the ghost’s point-of-view.

This makes the film more of a mystery than a vessel for jump scares. As we gradually learn more about the house’s new occupants (led by Lucy Liu’s workaholic matriarch), the ghost’s interest in teen daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), whose best friend has recently died in mysterious circumstances, becomes more pronounced, something Soderbergh uses to sneak in a meditation on the ever-evolving depravity of the male psyche.

The Brutalist and Presence are in cinemas from 24 January