This Year’s New Oscar Front-Runner Is Almost a Masterpiece. Then Comes That Ending. (2025)

Movies

This year’s Oscar front-runner starts out as a masterpiece. Then it falls apart.

By Dana Stevens

This Year’s New Oscar Front-Runner Is Almost a Masterpiece. Then Comes That Ending. (1)

This article contains spoilers for The Brutalist.

Normally I love to see movies alone, especially those I’m planning to write about at some point. Solo viewing is arguably the ideal mode for anyone looking to reflect on their response to a film before trying to put it into words; the train or car ride home is a chance to start formulating ideas and maybe get a few down on the page before that evanescent in-theater response fades away. But every once in a while, I walk out of a movie bereft not to have caught it with a friend, someone to pose questions and test-drive theories with as we talk out the experience we’ve just shared in real time.

That was certainly the case when I first saw Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist last fall, at one of its early 35mm press showings at the New York Film Festival. I lingered outside in a chilly drizzle as the packed house filed out, hoping to see someone I knew well enough to strike up a conversation. When no one appeared, I texted a friend, begging her to see it soon so I would have someone to talk about it with. It had been a while since I’d come out of a movie feeling that excited and that annoyed, that challenged and that dissatisfied.

A few weeks later, that same friend and I had a date to watch The Brutalist in its intended 70mm format, a near-obsolete wide-screen technology called VistaVision that hasn’t been used in an American feature film since 1961. But the day before, my friend suffered a minor injury that kept her home (she’s fine now!), so once again I found myself absorbing the whole of The Brutalist alone—all 215 minutes of it, from the arrival at Ellis Island of Lászlo Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Jewish Hungarian architect fleeing Europe in the wake of World WarII, to Tóth’s short-lived stint at the home and furniture shop of his much more assimilated Hungarian-born cousin (Alessandro Nivola), to his relationship with a sadistic and mercurial tycoon (Guy Pearce) who becomes Tóth’s first American client and tasks him with a building project that will soon become a consuming obsession for both men.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

I’m on record as a big admirer of The Brutalist. It made my Top10 list for the year, I wrote briefly but warmly about it in this year’s Slate Movie Club, and when the New York Film Critics Circle voted it the best picture of 2024, I volunteered to write the blurb for our awards-ceremony booklet. (Real talk: The movie had not been my No.1 pick for that slot, but I was nonetheless happy to see it recognized alongside Brody’s genuinely astonishing performance—which had been my No.1 pick for best actor.) Daniel Blumberg’s gorgeous, stately score, with a four-note horn theme whose ascending tones become a kind of leitmotif for the central character’s soaring ambition, has become the only 2024 soundtrack I put on regularly, and there are individual shots that have stayed with me in all their richness of detail and composition: Tóth’s first glimpse of the upside-down and then sideways Statue of Liberty, or a green hill at dusk with a line of human figures in silhouette ascending one side.

Advertisement

But every time I start to write or podcast or even just casually converse about The Brutalist, a film of dazzling highs and puzzling lows, I keep slamming into the wall of that ending. And by ending, I refer specifically to the film’s final six or seven minutes, the part that’s set off with a title card reading “Epilogue: The First Venice Biennale, 1980.”After three viewings of The Brutalist—the last time on DVD so as to rewind and catch every detail—I’m still not sure what Corbet and his partner and co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold were trying to accomplish with that coda, or what the audience is supposed to take away from a movie that ends in such an opaque swerve away from every character, idea, and theme it’s spent three and a half hours meticulously establishing.

Advertisement

The Brutalist’s opening chapter, covering the years 1947 to 1952, also has a title: “The Enigma of Arrival.” But that first 100-minute stretch constitutes by far the least enigmatic part of the movie. Up until the intermission, The Brutalist plays out as a thematically familiar if formally bold epic of immigration and struggle, a straightforward drama about an Eastern European refugee trying to build an American life—not to mention a colossal concrete edifice—from the ground up.

Advertisement

After the intermission (fully scored by Blumberg, in a nod to the grand road show–style releases of classic Hollywood), a title card for Part2 appears: “The Hard Core of Beauty,” covering the period from 1953 to 1960. As the curtain rises on this second act, a different temporality and a different plot logic seem to have taken over from the naturalistic world of Part1. One dreamlike sequence, filmed in the marble quarries of Carrara, where dust from the excavations turns the surrounding air milky white and voices echo eerily off the terraced cliffs, recalls not the Technicolor Hollywood epics of David Lean but the more or less contemporaneous tradition of European art film: Antonioni, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky. Conflicts that were symbolic in the first half become literal, as Pearce’s domineering Van Buren moves from playing financial power games with Tóth to sexually assaulting him. A character who has heretofore appeared only in epistolary voice-over, Tóth’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), finally makes her entrance as she is reunited with Lászlo, and the film’s concerns shift from external—how will our protagonist survive and find meaningful work in this alien land?—to internal: How will he and his wife navigate their passionate but stormy marriage after years of separation by a war so traumatic they can barely speak of it?

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

I don’t count myself among those critics who believe that The Brutalist falls apart in the passage from Part1 to Part2. True, the second half takes an unforeseen stylistic turn into more mythic territory, complete with a magic-realist scene in which Lászlo and Erzsébet make up for what it’s implied have been years of unsatisfying lovemaking with an all-night heroin-fueled sex session, culminating in a moment when they both appear to be hovering weightlessly in the air above their bed. But if The Brutalist had remained as narratively and thematically legible in its second chapter as it was in its first, it would be a lesser movie, a simple saga of an immigrant family adjusting to the hardships of life under postwar American capitalism. Instead, the film transmutes into something less sociological and more lyrical, a deconstruction and de-idealization of the assumptions that drove the first half: that if Lászlo could only manage to bring his family over from Hungary and wrest control of the building project from the authoritarian Van Buren and his penny-pinching underlings, he would finally experience the sense of freedom that his work struggles to express.

Advertisement

Advertisement

It’s only in the very final moments of Part2, just before the Venice-set epilogue, that my questions about what Corbet and Fastvold are doing start to accumulate. In what seems to be merely days after that night of sexual levitation culminated in Erzsébet’s accidental overdose, we suddenly see that character, who has been in a wheelchair since the war because of bone damage from malnutrition, standing on her feet for the first time. Using a walker, she visits the Van Buren mansion alone to confront the business magnate and his adult twin children (Joe Alwyn and Stacy Martin), announcing to the siblings, in front of their dinner guests, “Your father is an evil rapist.” In the confusion that follows, Van Buren disappears, and after an extended manhunt edited in the style of a classic suspense sequence, he is tracked to the towering concrete hulk that is Tóth’s community center in progress. As the search party ascends a staircase to the building’s central chapel, one cop tells his superior, “Think we’ve got something over here, Lieutenant,” suggesting that at least one person on the screen has a clue what happened to Harrison Van Buren. But whatever it is they have must remain a secret for the ages, because the fate of Pearce’s character is never mentioned again; the last shot of this section is a long tilt upward, revealing the rising sun shining through the cross-shaped window above the chapel’s marble altarpiece, carved from stone obtained on that fateful trip to Carrara.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

The ellipsis surrounding the disappearance of Van Buren seems intended to subvert audience expectations. After that dramatic search sequence sets us up for some sort of violent reveal (has he died by suicide somewhere on the grounds of his still-unfinished building, intended as a tribute to the mother to whom he had a clearly unwholesome Oedipal attachment?), this previously all-powerful figure simply vanishes from the story. Fair enough; if the second chapter had instead ended on an image of the tycoon’s dead body splayed across the altar, the symbolism would no doubt have felt obvious, an outcome too clearly telegraphed by all that had come before, and simply misguided: Though Van Buren may see himself as a persecuted and Christlike figure, that is far from the way the film wants us to perceive him. Perhaps denying this character the opportunity to display himself in such a self-flattering position is the entire point of the script’s elision of his final moments. But when, after a fade to black, we find ourselves in a gondola on the canals of Venice, accompanied by that four-note musical theme transformed into a disco synth mix, the mysteries only pile higher.

Advertisement

Advertisement

My first question about the Venice sequence might be posed, with a lesser degree of frustration, about nearly every scene in the movie, beginning with that inverted Lady Liberty: How are we to know, and does it matter, exactly who is seeing this? Throughout The Brutalist, this instability about perspective—about what subjective consciousness is noticing any given detail and choosing to show to us—has persisted. In a scene from Part1 where Tóth and Van Buren share their life stories over a postprandial drink at the mansion, the camera keeps cutting away to close-ups of the party in progress around them: hands dealing cards around a table, guests laughing and sipping champagne. It is not the men, absorbed in their discussion of Van Buren’s family troubles and Tóth’s professional background, who are noticing these things; it’s the director’s guiding consciousness, the equivalent of an omnipresent third-person narrator in a 19th-century novel. Similarly, the recurring use of archival materials, such as an educational film about the economic miracle of postwar Pennsylvania, is not meant to suggest that any of the characters is aware such a film exists. Rather, the filmmaker is selecting these materials for the audience, to be stitched into the story like patches in a multimedia quilt.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

But it’s only in the Venice finale that The Brutalist’s hard-to-locate perspective goes from being an interesting, occasionally distracting formal experiment to a vexing problem. Who is seeing this? Who is riding with a handheld camera in the gondola? Have we switched from the panoramic VistaVision format to low-fidelity, green-tinged Betamax video because some unseen member of the extended Tóth family is filming this on their home camera? Or is this footage being collected for some sort of public use, maybe a future educational film like the one about Pennsylvania steel production? That would explain the occasional shot transitions that make use of primitive digital effects, with one image slicing itself into diagonal sections before giving way to the next.

If I’m being somewhat jokingly literal in my reading of the Biennale section, it’s because this portion of the movie strikes me as not literal enough. It’s one thing to conclude on an open-ended note that leaves viewers unsure how to feel as they walk out; it’s something else again to just… stop, withholding a completed arc for every one of the major characters you’ve spent three and a half hours making us curious about. I know some critics who found The Brutalist aesthetically audacious but dramatically unengaging. The characters, to them, remained embodiments of grand ideas about art and war and capitalism rather than flesh-and-blood people. But even granting that there are moments when Corbet could be accused of hammering home his themes too bluntly, I never stopped caring about the actual, physical fate of Lászlo and Erzsébet Tóth and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). These are fascinating, complex characters, last seen at a moment of radical transition in their lives, so it’s disorienting when the final segment suddenly jumps ahead 20 years, to a time when Erzsébet has already died, Lászlo is unable to speak after what appears to be a stroke, and, in an ironic twist, only Zsófia (now played by Ariane Labed, with Cassidy appearing as the character’s own daughter), who was nonspeaking in her youth, remains to tell us what has befallen the family in the intervening decades.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

The sense of dislocation provoked by the coda may derive from the simple fact that the only person to speak in it (with the exception of an announcer who briefly introduces her) is the adult Zsófia, making a speech in the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where her uncle’s lifetime of groundbreaking architectural work is being honored. It’s been established early in the film that Lászlo is not interested in talking about the larger meaning of his work as an architect: Struggling to answer a question about why he went into the field, he responds in his sometimes fractured English that “nothing is of its own explanation.” Yet Zsófia has a ready explanation for everything, filling the viewer in on previously unknown details of the Tóths’ wartime experience—he spent time in the Buchenwald concentration camp, while Erzsébet and Zsófia were at Dachau—and laying out the hidden meanings behind Lászlo’s design for the Van Buren Institute.

Is Zsófia right? Is her address meant to be taken at face value as both an explanation of her uncle’s work and a tribute to him? She seems like a devoted enough niece, though it isn’t clear from her monologue how large a role her uncle could have played in her life since she immigrated to Israel decades before. To judge by the images at the retrospective, most of Tóth’s career was spent building projects in the U.S., including the Van Buren building, finally finished in 1973. (Under the direction, still, of the rapist industrialist, or had he passed away by that time? We never find out.) Since Erzsébet seems to have made good on her promise to follow her niece to Israel, we can assume that her husband did not keep the promise he made to her in the hospital after her overdose, the final words we hear Lászlo speak: “I will follow you. I will follow you until I die.”

Having walked you through an essay on The Brutalist whose length and degree of detail rival the film itself, I’ll end by at last permitting myself to ask the questions I would have peppered my friend with after that first September screening as she walked me to the subway in the rain: Are we to conclude that Lászlo has been physically and emotionally destroyed by his wartime experience and the decades of struggle after? Did he continue to be an on-again, off-again heavy user of drugs, arguably the world’s highest-functioning heroin addict, throughout what appears to have been a successful and productive career? Or did he kick the habit and experience some degree of fulfillment as an artist and a human being during the two decades that pass between our final glimpse of him by his wife’s bedside and the moment we see him being pushed in a wheelchair through the Biennale? Is this a “Rosebud”-style ending, in which all the earthly strivings of the ostensibly successful protagonist are exposed as futile attempts to feed an insatiable ego?

Last of all, when both the movie and Zsófia’s speech end rather flatly with her citation of a supposed favorite saying of her uncle’s—“No matter what others try to sell you, it is the destination, not the journey”—why does that reversal of a well-known cliché sound distinctly unlike anything the character of Lászlo as we have known him would ever say? If Tóth’s life goal really was to arrive at some unspecified but all-important destination, he has been done a disservice by the final few moments of the often-brilliant film that brought him into being. After a journey of staggering proportions with moments of breathtaking beauty along the way, I’m not sure I understand where, or whether, The Brutalist finally arrives.

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.

  • The Oscars

Advertisement

This Year’s New Oscar Front-Runner Is Almost a Masterpiece. Then Comes That Ending. (2025)
Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Laurine Ryan

Last Updated:

Views: 5753

Rating: 4.7 / 5 (57 voted)

Reviews: 88% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Laurine Ryan

Birthday: 1994-12-23

Address: Suite 751 871 Lissette Throughway, West Kittie, NH 41603

Phone: +2366831109631

Job: Sales Producer

Hobby: Creative writing, Motor sports, Do it yourself, Skateboarding, Coffee roasting, Calligraphy, Stand-up comedy

Introduction: My name is Laurine Ryan, I am a adorable, fair, graceful, spotless, gorgeous, homely, cooperative person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.