To quote an old-ass meme, you know shit’s gonna get real when the A24 logo looks all fucked up at the start of a preview. That’s the case with Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which won the director honors at Venice, played to large crowds at TIFF, and is commanding a 70mm release nationwide. We, to say the least, are not the world’s biggest fans of Corbet, who parlayed a career as Chloe’s boyfriend on 24 into making self-indulgent nightmares, but The Brutalist has us intrigued.
We would have seen it at TIFF had it not been directly programmed against Megalopolis — apparently, there could only be one showtime for any architecture-related projects — but Adrian Brody in The Hungarian Fountainhead seems like a hell of a movie, regardless of who’s behind the camera. A24 dropped a trailer for the film that is as short as the movie is long: Just a bare minute of footage for a three-and-a-half-hour movie.
Peep it:
Here’s a synopsis from the TIFF Program:
“Director Brady Corbet (‘Vox Lux,’ TIFF ’18) returns to the Festival with another bold vision — an American epic, starring Adrien Brody as a Jewish Hungarian architect who flees Europe at the end of the Second World War to rebuild his life in an unfamiliar land.
László Toth (Brody) arrives in America with barely anything to his name, eagerly hoping to soon be joined by his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). Settling in Philadelphia, he has a not-so-gracious run-in with Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy businessman, after he becomes an unwitting client for a home renovation scheme. This serendipitous encounter leads to a more complex undertaking, as Van Buren and his son (Joe Alwyn) enlist László’s brilliance for a monumental new project. It’s a dream that he never thought he could relive, but it comes with a dark cost, as László sacrifices more and more of himself to complete his exacting vision.
Presented in 70mm at the Festival, this is the most ambitious project of Corbet — working again with frequent co-writer Mona Fastvold — to date. Brody gives a potent performance as a man trying to reconstruct his life, his love, and his home, all as part of the same process. ‘The Brutalist’ takes us on a journey that asks some stark questions about how the march of time impacts us, how certain events give shape to our lives, and how much of ourselves we put in our work.”
The Brutalist will have a limited release in 70MM starting on December 20, before expanding to theaters nationwide in the following weeks.