The Brutalist is a three-and-a-half-hour epic starring Adrien Brody as an architect and Holocaust survivor

While watching the movie "The Brutalist" during intermission, you might find yourself impulsively searching online, wondering if its traumatized but talented protagonist, Laszlo Toth, is a real person. This thought is understandable.

This fictional character—a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor played by Adrien Brody—possesses a monumental presence, uniqueness, and impact, much like the concrete behemoths he constructs in this three-and-a-half-hour film. We meet him in 1947 as a weathered, solitary man arriving in the United States, his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zofia (Raffiella Chapman) trapped in Europe, having been forcibly separated from him at some point.

He dreams of a second chance, which arrives in the form of a commission from Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist who owns a large plot of land on a verdant hilltop in rural Pennsylvania and is eager to leave his mark. Van Buren also arranges for Toth's family to be brought to America, imposing this gesture—and other acts of supposed kindness—on the architect, creating an uneasy power dynamic between artist and patron, both of whom need each other.

The public building—a tall, somber space intended to serve as a church, civic center, and gymnasium—may be named after Van Buren's late mother, but it feels more like a tribute to and display of his own wealth, success, and taste. After all, he dismisses Toth’s proposal for a swimming pool with three simple words: “I don’t swim.” Like the building at its center, "The Brutalist" doesn't shy away from its grandiosity, with huge thematic and visual scope. The film explores the exploitative promises of the American dream, the trauma of displacement, and how the self both necessitates and corrupts art, among many other issues.

The film is also shot in VistaVision, a wide-screen film format largely unused since the 1960s, which imbues the world of "The Brutalist" with a sense of oppressiveness. Both thrilling and frightening in a romantic sense, "The Brutalist" solidifies an important voice: director Brady Corbet, who co-wrote the script with his wife, filmmaker Mona Fastvold. But a large part of "The Brutalist's" power must be attributed to production designer Judy Becker, whose gorgeous architectural masterpieces testify to Toth’s genius and make the film—and him—feel real. Credit is also due to cinematographer Lol Crawley, who creates a disquieting cinematic language of chaos and calm by alternating between VistaVision and Steadicam.

Corbet, a former child actor who grew up on the sets of masters like Michael Haneke ("Funny Games"), Gregg Araki ("Mysterious Skin"), and Lars von Trier ("Melancholia"), has now created three compelling, accomplished, and unsettling stories about ambition and self, set against the backdrop of pivotal moments in the last century. What he wants to say about those moments isn't always clear—whether it's 2015's "The Childhood of a Leader," about a fascist upbringing during wartime, or 2018's "Vox Lux," a bizarre, thrilling drama starring Natalie Portman about a pop star whose career is interrupted by acts of terror, from a school shooting to 9/11. "The Brutalist," in Corbet's own words, "tells the story of a character who escapes fascism only to encounter capitalism."

(Intermission, please pause for 15 minutes)

There are no flashbacks in the film to Toth’s time at Buchenwald concentration camp, but the weight of that experience is immediately evident on Brody’s gaunt frame—and, on a meta level, in the public’s memory, given that the actor is famous for winning an Oscar for playing a real-life Holocaust survivor in "The Pianist." Ideally, this should be Brody's second Oscar. He brings to Toth a sense of being utterly rooted in pain: a deep understanding of what it means to constantly face humiliation after having experienced atrocity.

When we meet Toth, he is a shell of a man, living in a storeroom of his cousin's furniture store in Pennsylvania. He has two forms of release: heroin, which he uses to numb himself, and the act of design, which completely transforms Toth’s essence, as if he is touching something higher. His labor has a methodical elegance, first seen when he builds a Bauhaus chaise lounge (similar to designs by Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer). Sparks fly across his determined, resolute face as he listens to Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, celebrate the UN's 1947 vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

"The Brutalist" is a film of grand ideas. It’s about the beauty of design, the mess of art materializing, and the crudeness and violence of labor, money, and ideology that exists between them. It’s about how the beauty of a piece is corrupted, then how the sweat and blood are romanticized by time, and the pain is forgotten—or considered necessary, and therefore inevitable—to its creation. (Whether this extends to Israel is unclear; "The Brutalist" has been labeled both Zionist and anti-Zionist by critics, the country looming in the film's background.)

Inevitably, in its grand scope, some details are lost in the mix. Its more horrific traumas (often inflicted by a sneering Pearce, in what is a career-best performance) feel more like mechanical plot advancements, and aren't always given the depth that Toth, the scenery, and his buildings are. The same is true of the film's female characters, especially Erzsébet. We are told that her marriage to Toth is a meeting of two sharp minds, that she was a keen journalist before the war, but we rarely see that spark. There are moments that shine through (a late scene is the stuff of Oscar nominations for Jones), but for the most part, Erzsébet is just another "genius's frustrated wife."

There's also Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), the first friend Toth makes in America, whom he meets while waiting in line at a food bank. The character feels shoehorned in to show Toth’s goodness, as he brings Gordon into his work and gives him a job. Or, on a larger level, to show the potential solidarity between the American Jewish and Black communities. Either way, he doesn't exist as a person with his own life. But ultimately, "The Brutalist" is a beautiful, complex behemoth. It’s more ambitious than what we currently expect from American cinema—and larger, both physically and thematically. It treats its audience with intelligence, without the refreshing didacticism or slogan-like morality (apologies to all the "eat the rich" movies).

Like Toth’s concrete masterpiece, the final product is so clean and polished that it doesn't show the immense effort that must have gone into making "The Brutalist" on a mere $10 million budget. We can only stand back and try to absorb it all. "The Brutalist" is now in theaters.