Film review: The Brutalist – It isn’t really about brutalism…

By Sarah Simpkin 2025-02-04T07:00:00

Architecture is the device to explore wider themes in Brady Corbet’s ambitious three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic that looks set to sweep The Oscars, writes Sarah Simpkin

I didn’t go to see The Brutalist at the Barbican, but at the Curzon Mayfair. Its coffered ceilings and bas-relief walls aren’t brutalist, no. But given the cinema’s battles against development, it felt right for a film based around preserving the integrity of an architectural vision against commercial forces. And it’s a nice cinema, isn’t it?

This willingness to indulge technical inaccuracies is significant because The Brutalist isn’t really about brutalism either. Architecture is the device to explore wider themes of trauma, the Holocaust, migration, addiction, marriage, art and power.

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