Film review Epic tale of the construction of modern America will leave audiences dizzy

Brady Corbet's amazing and engrossing epic is about the design of postwar America and what was mixed into its foundations at the building stage.

- Peter Bradshaw

The Brutalist

Venice film festival

It asks us to decide if and how the brutalism of the title applies to something other than architecture, and wonders about the future ruin of what we all imagine at the drawing board of youth: an American Ozymandias.

It is about antisemitism and the capitalist adventure, about the unassimilated immigrant experience, and about American can-do naivety versus the tragic, painful depths of European culture and expertise.

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity - and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

It feels as if it must be based on a real-life case, or at least a literary source but this is an original screenplay by Corbet and his co-screenwriter, Mona Fastvold.

It is the biopic of an imaginary Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor, László Tóth, who comes to the US in poverty after the Second World War but revives his distinguished career with the impulsive, eccentric patronage of a wealthy man with the Wasppresidential name of Van Buren.