The Brutalist Poster UK — Buy Adrien Brody's Oscar-Winning Drama Wall Art

Adrien Brody · Felicity Jones · Guy Pearce · Venice Grand Jury Prize · 215 minutes · The prestige film of 2024 — from £3 at 98types Camden

The Prestige Film of 2024 — 215 Minutes, One Architectural Vision

The Brutalist (2024), written and directed by Brady Corbet and shot on VistaVision (the large-format process used in Alfred Hitchcock's films of the 1950s), follows Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) from his arrival in the United States as a Holocaust survivor in 1947 through his thirty-year career as one of America's foremost Brutalist architects, including his central project: a vast arts complex commissioned by wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). The film runs 215 minutes (plus a 15-minute intermission in theatrical screenings) and is the most formally ambitious narrative film of 2024.

Corbet's direction is the work of a filmmaker who has absorbed the lessons of the European art cinema tradition — Tarkovsky's long takes, Kubrick's geometric framing, Fassbinder's political melodrama — and applied them to an American story about immigration, assimilation, artistic compromise and the specific violence of patronage. The VistaVision format (chosen by Corbet because it was the format of American cinema's first great period of post-war ambition) gives the film a visual scale and clarity that amplifies its architectural subject: the Brutalist buildings in the film look as monumental on screen as they do in person.

Adrien Brody — His Second Academy Award

Adrien Brody won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Brutalist — his second Oscar, twenty-two years after his first (The Pianist, Roman Polanski, 2002). The specific quality of Brody's performance as László Tóth — the combination of artistic visionary, trauma survivor, addict, husband and immigrant — required him to portray a character across thirty years of deterioration and creative evolution, maintaining the specific physical and psychological continuity of a character whose external circumstances change radically while his essential nature remains consistent. It is the most comprehensive character study Brody has undertaken in his career.

Brutalist Architecture — The Visual Language of the Film

Brutalist architecture — the movement that emerged in the 1950s and peaked in the 1970s, characterised by exposed concrete, geometric repetition, monumental scale and a deliberate rejection of decorative ornament in favour of structural honesty — is the film's central metaphor as well as its visual subject. László Tóth's buildings are designed to impose their material reality on their environment: they do not apologise for their size, their weight or their presence. The film argues that this quality — the refusal to apologise for one's existence — is the quality that immigrant communities in America have been systematically required to suppress in order to achieve even partial acceptance.