The Brutalist is the Great American Novel in movie form. A monument to old-school cinema – 70mm VistaVision, roadshow-style intermissions, three-Oscar-nominated performances and all – Brady Corbet’s epic is full of big, brilliantly executed ideas about the migrant experience, cultural assimilation, the abuse of power, love of family, and architecture as an expression of collective trauma.
The story follows a brutalist architect, László Toth (Adrien Brody), loosely inspired by Hungarian-German modernist Marcel Breuer, another European émigré to America. Like Breuer, Toth is a graduate of Germany’s Bauhaus design school. Unlike Breuer, he’s a survivor of the Holocaust, who finds that patronage of Pennsylvanian blood blue Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) comes laced with poison. His wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), snared in bureaucracy, awaits transit from Europe to join him.
But it’s not just Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold’s vision up there in lights. Judy Becker, the production designer behind such period masterpieces as Carol and Brokeback Mountain, painstakingly crafted its world of money and status. She also realised its architectural visions, including The Institute, the vast brutalist edifice Van Buren commissions Toth to construct to his late mum.
Time Out speaks to Becker in her Cape Cod home the morning after the 2025 Oscar nominations are announced. ‘I woke up early for me, which is 8.30am, to watch it in bed,’ she says. ‘The heat's not working, the carbon monoxide alarm went off last night, so it's not very romantic! But emotionally I'm celebrating.’
I come from a Jewish family so it was a daunting prospect
It’s her second Academy Awards nomination – after American Hustle in 2023 – and recognition for an extraordinary feat in world-building. Even architecture greats have taken notice. Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind One World Trade Center and Berlin’s Jewish Museum, wrote an article praising the film. (For balance, some architects feel differently.)
What inspired The Brutalist?
The Brutalist’s story maps the aesthetic vibe shift of 1950s America. Fussy art deco is out; stark modernism is in. And brutalism is the most extreme articulation of that change, with László Toth’s designs for The Institute adding another, confronting dimension: the industrial look of the Nazi concentration camps he’d lived through.
‘There’s a part of me that likes to work without too many influences,’ notes Becker of replicating the aesthetic of genocide, ‘[but] I looked at a lot of imagery from action concentration camps and I visited some Holocaust memorials in Budapest.’ She didn’t visit the camps themselves. ‘If we’d shot in Poland I would have – because we were originally going to film in Krakow. I come from a Jewish family so it was a daunting prospect. That was the hardest part of the design process for me.’
From a DC subway station to a Japanese church, Becker talked us through the other surprising real-life edifices that informed The Brutalist.
1. The Breuer Building, New York
‘Marcel Breuer’s old Whitney Museum was always on my mind. There's many different kinds of brutalism and this one is very minimal. Brutalism is very modern and forward-thinking and post-war, and tends to include a lot of concrete, of course. There's beautiful [brutalist] buildings in London. I've been on walking tours and visited council estates that were considered very ugly – and still are – but are considered desirable places to live, like the Barbican.’
2. Breuer House in Wellfleet, Massachusetts
‘My husband and I were driving and we passed this amazing modern house. We stopped and I took a lot of pictures and it turned out it was a Breuer house. It influenced the design of Van Buren’s library. When I was [designing] László and Erzsébet's guesthouse and the New York apartment, I got a lot of inspiration from Breuer's personal life. His own tastes were very simple. I could see László living like that on a smaller scale’.
3. Church of the Light, Japan
‘I was inspired by [architects] like Tadao Ando. He’s a more contemporary brutalist architect and how I envisioned László in a sense, because he's more strict: a lot of concrete and no windows. I looked at this famous church with a cross made of light as soon as I read the script, because Brady has this cross reflecting on the altar [in The Institute]. It's so beautiful.’
4. The Washington Metro
‘When you enter The Institute, it has a very steep staircase. I was thinking about the Washington DC subway system, which was designed by a brutalist architect called Harry Weese. You can’t believe the distance you're going underground – and the angle. It’s scary the first 10 times you do it, and I wanted entering The Institute to be a frightening experience.
5. Bulova Watch building, New York
‘The Institute was also inspired by industrial buildings or crematoriums. [In the film] Van Buren is asking for a community centre and what he's getting is this industrial tribute to the Holocaust. I looked at a book on industrial architecture from the 1930s a lot when I was designing The Institute. On the way to JFK Airport in Queens, there's the Bulova Watch building. It doesn't look anything like The Institute but it's very much of that style.’
The Brutalist is in cinemas now.