ART OF STONE

"The Brutalist."

- JUSTIN CHANG

Adrien Brody stars in Brady Corbet's film.

Not long into "The Brutalist," the director Brady Corbet plunges us into darkness a darkness that, although neither formless nor void, marks the film as a creation story. Deep in the hold of a ship that has just arrived in New York Harbor, the camera is propelled deckward, alongside a weary Hungarian Jewish refugee, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), as he pushes his way through the crowd.

It's 1947, and the horrors that László fled in Europe he survived Buchenwaldseem to coalesce, below deck, in Corbet's virtuosic shadow play. The weight of the past bears down on László in the handheld jostling of the camera, in the ticking-time-bomb percussion of Daniel Blumberg's score, and, most of all, in the sombre, disembodied voice of László's wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he was cruelly separated. "There is nothing left for us here," she writes to him. "Go to America and I will follow you."