The Brutalist Was Three Hours of Watching a Man Be Mad at Architecture, and I Loved Every Minute of It

Here's my controversial take: The Brutalist is the most interesting thing to happen to American cinema in years, and it's fundamentally unpleasant to watch. That's not a bug. That's the entire point, and most critics are too busy praising its "ambition" to admit they were actively uncomfortable for 215 minutes.

Brady Corbet made a movie about a Hungarian-Jewish architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who survives the Holocaust, immigrates to America, and then spends the entire runtime getting systematically destroyed by capitalism, American arrogance, and his own inability to compromise. It's bleak. It's confrontational. It has no character arc where he learns to be vulnerable. He doesn't get the girl. He doesn't save the day. He builds a brutalist mansion for a vulgar billionaire and watches it become a monument to his own irrelevance.

And it's shot in VistaVision on actual film, which means Corbet is making a three-hour argument against streaming, superhero movies, and the entire Marvel-industrial complex without saying a single word about it. Just by existing as a brick wall of a film that refuses to move faster than an aging European architect can walk through a Pennsylvania construction site.

The thing that infuriates me about the discourse around this film is how many people are treating "difficult" and "important" like they're the same word. They're not. The Brutalist is difficult. It's deliberately, aggressively difficult. It doesn't want you to enjoy it in a traditional sense. It wants you to feel what László feels—trapped, patronized, erased by forces more powerful than taste or integrity.

Guy Pearce plays László's patron, Van Buren, and he's doing the finest work of his career as a man who literally cannot understand why an artist wouldn't want to build a massive monument to his own ego. Every scene between them is a masterclass in how power dynamics actually work when money meets art.

Is it for everyone? No. Is it self-indulgent? Absolutely. Does it drag in the second hour? Yes, intentionally. But this is what happens when a 30-year-old director with real vision gets access to 70mm cameras and the freedom to make something that refuses to be palatable.

We spent two decades complaining that cinema had been flattened into content. Then someone made an actual film—dense, frustrating, magnificent—and everyone's acting shocked it's not more fun.

It's not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to matter. Go see it in IMAX if your city still has it. Skip the convenience of your couch. Sit in actual discomfort for three hours. That's the entire argument.