In 1930, the architect Fritz Landauer designed one of the very few synagogues to be built in the so-called Bauhaus style, before the Nazis came to power in Germany. His synagogue in Plauen, in Saxony, was an austere box with punched-in windows. It was destroyed in Kristallnacht in 1938. By then, Landauer had escaped to London, where he designed two more synagogues in a similarly hardline style, at Willesden and Golders Green. Unable to get any more work as an architect beyond these projects, he joined an undertaker’s firm and designed gravestones for the rest of his life. The synagogue in Golders Green was buried in layers of additions; that in Willesden was covered in fake stone cladding and turned into an evangelical church. Landauer died forgotten and has not been remembered.
Mentioning the apparently uncinematic story of Fritz Landauer – and there are others like him – is one way to cope with the spectacular disregard for architectural history in The Brutalist (The granddaughter of one of the famous Hungarian brutalist architects on whom the film is allegedly based sent me a WhatsApp message a few days ago – ‘I just saw The Brutalist, and hated it’. She didn’t know I had to review it.) Architects, and people who love architecture, have been notably cold about the film. But pointing out its solecisms and caricatures is also a way of trying to find something concrete to hold on to in this gas giant of a film. The Brutalist isn’t really interested in ‘architecture’ – it’s interested in ‘big’ themes, which it engages with in a ‘big’ and wafty way. The relationship between ‘the artist’ and ‘the client’ is a particularly obvious theme. So is ‘the immigrant experience’. Another is ‘trauma’. Another, with depressing inevitability, is ‘America’.
The film’s fictional hero, László Tóth, is a Bauhaus-trained architect, who was once very successful at home in Budapest and survived the concentration camps. He arrives at Ellis Island and moves to small-town Pennsylvania through a family connection. Rather than linking up with his former colleagues in the Bauhaus, scores of whom (in the real world) were building in Ivy League universities, taking over the architecture schools, designing housing projects and skyscrapers and building tiny houses for themselves with the proceeds, Tóth is a lone figure. He has one friend, a Black construction worker who is depicted in the style of the Shawshank Redemption as a loyal, almost mute sidekick without the faintest interiority. Tóth is hired by a Pennsylvania businessman to design a combined community centre and church, which – spoiler alert! – becomes an obsessive personal project. He becomes addicted to heroin; his wife, a journalist, crippled in the camps, arrives in New York; their niece emigrates to Israel and tries to convince them to do the same. Tóth takes his client to see Carrara marble in the Italian mountains where it is quarried (he seems never to have seen the material before, even though it is common in monuments and churches across the United States). The rest is spoilers.
The client-architect relationship is utterly fraught in The Brutalist. Courtesy A24
Because of the film’s obsession with America’s cold reception of Jewish immigrants, Israel becomes the film’s unseen utopia. It is remarkable in 2025 that the film’s crude, uncritical Zionism has largely escaped censure. Here, again, the film takes place in its own bizarre non-time, where Tóth knows no other architects. ‘Where will you live?’, he asks his niece as she announces her aliyah to Israel. Perhaps in one of the literally thousands of flats, houses and kibbutzim designed by Tóth’s Bauhaus colleagues in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem? But Israel doesn’t really exist for Brady Corbet, the film’s director; it is merely a contrast to America, a place to hold up as an alternative to WASP world, with its racism and violence (qualities that might also exist in Israel). In The Brutalist, McCarthyism, the real scare of the time – frequently directed at modern architects who had socialist pasts most tried to hide – is depicted as the faint shadow behind the explicit antisemitism. In reality, the anticommunism was loud and aggressive, and the antisemitism was the dogwhistle.
If the film were called, let’s say, Tortured Genius, or Skaggy Architect, perhaps none of this would matter, and we could assess it only as a film (in my view, an exceptionally bad one, albeit with some powerful moments in the more relaxed first half and two fine performances from Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce). The architecture it is really ‘about’ is not brutalism, certainly not the dialectical, tactile, articulate architecture of Hungarian émigrés such as Ernö Goldfinger or Marcel Breuer. Corbet’s real crush is on the 1990s and 2000s products of high-end, coffee-table-book designers such as Tadao Ando or Peter Zumthor, who favoured singular, funeral monuments, with an obsessive sanding away of brutalism’s rugged surfaces. The title of the film’s interminable second act, ‘The Hard Core of Beauty’, is borrowed from an essay by Zumthor; Tóth’s completed building is an Ando parody, right down to the cross of pure light penetrating an empty space of concrete and marble. It is an architecture for the self-important and simple-minded, and perfect for this film.
The Brutalist is out in cinemas now.