The Brutalist Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

The Brutalist Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 27, 2025

For such a relentlessly dramatic film, The Brutalist has engendered a fair degree of humor, perhaps especially with regard to the most recent Academy Awards ceremony. Host Conan O'Brien got off one of his better punchlines when he quipped, "The Brutalist . . . received 10 nominations. I loved it, and didn't want it to end. Luckily, it didn't". I've seen and/or heard a number of other hilarious jokes about the film, including one similar to O'Brien's that stated the film lasted longer than the actual Brutalist movement. Some of the "comedy" surrounding the film at the Oscars has also focused on star Adrien Brody, who of course took home the Best Actor honors for his performance in the film as László Tóth, probably the very definition of a tortured artist, or in this case, architect. Evidently during Brody's interminable acceptance speech the son of a friend of mine asked his Dad, "When's intermission?" And I have it on good authority that one curmudgeon may have whispered under his breath as Brody droned on, "Where's Will Smith when you really need him?" All of that aside, what is one to make of The Brutalist? As is disclosed in a rather interesting set of interviews with co-writers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold included on this disc as a supplement, both of them had celebrated architects in their own families, and both had long had a personal interest in architecture in general and Brutalism in particular. That's all well and good, but the actual narrative of The Brutalist may be a minefield that is, yes, explosive, but which inevitably results in fragmentation and maybe even a bit of shell shock for the viewer.

In a way, there's a fascinating inherent dialectic in terms of László Tóth serving as a virtual personification of Brutalism, a style that kind of ironically became associated with totalitarianism despite having at least a major part of its genesis occur in the United Kingdom. But Tóth is introduced as a Holocaust survivor (if only barely), and that alone would seem to make him an unlikely proponent of a "movement" formed to espouse utilitarian ends, even if little "means" like individuals get run over in the process, though the movement would of course most likely rely upon a well known idiom describing what's "justified" in that regard. Even given that seemingly inexplicable disparity, which might admittedly be countered by a recognition that a character with Tóth's "baggage" might be drawn to a seemingly monolithic, emotionless style like Brutalism, the film seems to suggest that Tóth is a pawn of an arrogant would be patron named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, Academy Award nominated for this performance). And it may in fact be the on again, off again (on again, off again, ad infinitum) relationship between Van Buren and Tóth that may frustrate even patient viewers. Couldn't Tóth find even one other prospective client?

If architecture in general and Brutalism in particular could almost be thought of as the Hitchcockian "McGuffin" of the film, that may well be the best way to approach a sprawling, novelistic story that may really be more about the post World War II immigrant experience in the United States, or at least a post World War II immigrant experience. But even here the narrative is almost so deliberately sui generis that it becomes hard to generalize its offerings out into the wider world and be able to draw meaningful thematic "lessons" as a result. How many struggling architects with a heroin habit and an initially missing family could there have been? The specificity of the writing in The Brutalist is arguably both a strength and a potential stumbling block, as the sheer strangeness, indeed completely unique quality, of this tale seems to introduce a distancing aspect that may keep some of its attempts to wrest emotion seem ineffective. Yes, one might absolutely say the same thing about other films featuring Holocaust survivors in settings emphasizing their American "careers" like The Pawnbroker, but The Brutalist almost seems like a, well, artisan take on this perceived niche.

As I mentioned in my now virtually ancient Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? Blu-ray review, I was a devoted acolyte of Ayn Rand, and so of course had my own adolescent rites of passage reading not just that huge tome but also The Fountainhead, and in that regard it may be salient to compare the characters of Howard Roark and László Tóth. Rand famously begins her novel with a depiction of Roark laughing on a cliff before diving into water below, and it may be something of an understatement to say it's hard to imagine Tóth doing anything like that. More saliently, though, Roark, an All American if ever there were one, is almost genetically predisposed against compromising his aesthetic to anyone, let alone one patrician type who, a la Van Buren, strings a poor schlub along before doing something even worse (which won't be overtly mentioned here).

The upshot of all of this is as impressive as The Brutalist undeniably is, on both a sheer technical level but also of course with regard to some amazing performances, I couldn't help but ask repeatedly (given the sheer length of this opus), "What is this all supposed to mean?" Sure, you can certainly take moments like the views of the Statue of Liberty askew (in framings that seem to echo some of the upside down American flags that have been prevalent) as potent if maybe too on the nose symbols for an American Dream that Tóth is never going to be able to realize, but, to quote a certain Peggy Lee lyric, is that all there is? There may be more substantial "rewards" available in some of the personal, as opposed to professional (?), material, including Tóth's relationships with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (played by a trio of actresses at different ages).

The Brutalist Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Brutalist is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of A24 with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (mostly) in 1.66:1 (a number of variant aspect ratios occur during some brief interstitial uses of things like stock footage). If Brutalism emphasized a certain homogeneous monolithic quality, The Brutalist may be something more of a cobbled together affair, so to speak, featuring a variety of techniques including at least brief uses of digital capture and with both 16mm and 35mm sources in terms of actual celluloid, and with VistaVision also added to the mix. The result brings undeniable variability to both detail levels and probably especially noticeable at this resolution grain structure, though changes in the grain field are probably at least a bit more subliminal at times at this resolution than in A24's 4K UHD result. Large swaths of the film tend to be "Brutalist" in nature in terms of a kind of bland, gray palette, but there are some very interesting grading and production design choices (some of which are mentioned in cinematographer Lol Crawley's commentary) that add some variety to the proceedings. Tones in both yellow-orange and blue-green ranges especially have some vivid pop throughout. Detail levels can vary fairly widely depending on the source film format, and some of the 16mm material in particular can show markedly less fine detail, especially in some of the more dimly lit shots. As I discuss in the review of A24's 4K UHD release, that disc has no HDR, and so this 1080 version may well be the way to go for interested consumers.

The Brutalist Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Brutalist features a really expressive and almost hallucinatory at times DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that delivers consistent, if at times nightmarish, immersion courtesy of both scoring choices and especially some almost ghostly sound effects. That latter quality frankly kind of reminded me at times of some elements of the sound design of another A24 offering, The Zone of Interest, especially in terms of the pulsing midrange and lower frequency effects. Daniel Blumberg's score is very nicely spacious, and as has been reported, the opening vignette in the film is a modern day update on the vintage "composed film" technique utilized by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, with forced (yellow) English subtitles for various foreign languages, and optional English subtitles available for the rest of the feature.

The Brutalist Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Director of Photography Lol Crawley


• The Architects of The Brutalist (HD; 24:23) is an interesting background piece with a number of good interviews.

This is packaged in the same manner as many A24 exclusives, with a slipbox enclosing a DigiPack. The left side of the DigiPack has a sleeve which holds six art cards (which I found spectacularly difficult to dislodge).

The Brutalist Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I actually wanted to be an architect for a long time when I was a kid, and my childhood best friend's father actually was a rather prominent architect in Salt Lake City (along with my parents' house, he designed the first parts of both Sundance and Snowbird), and he invited me to his office when I was probably six or seven to see what it was like. Even at that tender age, when I saw all the math involved (including the use of a slide rule, since it was still the Dark Ages), I knew I had better start searching for a new career dream. Persevering with a dream even when fate keeps dealing you obstacles may be one central idea in the story of László Tóth, but The Brutalist may frankly have too outsized ambitions to concisely handle a "simple" theme like that. In many ways the film is staggering and maybe undeniably exhausting, but it may simply have too much on its veritable drawing board to ever offer a cohesive design. Technical merits are solid and the supplements enjoyable and informative. With my personal caveats noted, Recommended.