The Brutalist Broke My Brain and I'm Mad at David Fincher for Making Me Care

Listen. I went into The Brutalist prepared to hate it. Three and a half hours? VistaVision? A black-and-white sequence about Hungarian architecture? This felt like the kind of movie designed specifically to make film critics feel smart while actual humans check their phones in the dark.

I was wrong. More annoyingly, I was wrong loud.

Brady Corbet's film about László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect rebuilding his life in post-war America, is simultaneously the most beautiful and most infuriating thing I've experienced in a theater. Adrien Brody carries the entire weight of human survival on his face for 210 minutes. Guy Pearce plays a vulgar industrialist named Van Buren with the kind of grotesque energy that makes you understand why some people become Marxists. The cinematography is so precise it feels like watching oil paint dry, except the oil paint is your own emotional capacity.

Here's what nobody's telling you: this movie is mean. It doesn't flatter you. It doesn't give you the satisfaction beats you want. Just when you think there's going to be catharsis, Corbet cuts to black and reminds you that life is about enduring, not triumphing. The film's philosophy appears to be "suffering is the human condition and you should sit still and think about that for 3.5 hours."

And yet.

I cannot stop thinking about it. I'm not saying it's fun—it's actively not fun. I'm saying that somewhere around hour two, when Tóth is physically building something impossibly beautiful while emotionally destroying himself, I realized Corbet had me. Not charmed. Not entertained. Held.

The film argues that art requires sacrifice, that immigrants carry unbearable weight, that capitalism corrupts creation, and that sometimes you just have to keep working even when the work is killing you. These aren't new ideas. But Corbet photographs them in VistaVision like they're the most important ideas anyone's ever had, and somehow that honesty—that unironic commitment to the material—becomes radical.

Is it slow? Yes. Should you see it in a theater, ideally in VistaVision, preferably at an actual cinema and not streaming on your laptop where it will feel like a punishment? Also yes. Will you enjoy yourself? That depends on whether you think art is supposed to be pleasurable or necessary.

I landed somewhere in the middle. It's a masterpiece that doesn't want to be liked, which is probably why it deserves to be seen.