The Brutalist (2024)

I can easily pretend that I am able to keep an open mind when going into every film I watch, but it's just as easy for me to admit that I didn't expect to enjoy The Brutalist. A serious movie, a seriously loooooong movie (it's 214 minutes, and includes an intermission), and a serious amount of Adrien Brody being all serious just doesn't thrill me. The Brutalist is REALLY good though.

Brody stars as László Tóth, a man who has to try and start his life over again after fleeing post-war Europe in the late 1940s. He wants to get everything back on track as quickly as possible, keen to reunite with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and the young niece she is raising (Zsófia, played by Raffey Cassidy). Things don't go well, initially, but the passage of time allows at least one man (the wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce) to see László for the talented individual he is. Will that talent be enough to keep him safe and welcome though, or is László destined to be perceived through a filter of preconceptions and prejudices?

Working on a screenplay once again with Mona Fastvold, director Brady Corbet here helms his most impressive feature yet (even better than The Childhood Of A Leader). It's still going to be too slow and sedate for some people, but there's something important in every scene here, whether it's obvious or not, and Fastvold and Corbet justify the hefty runtime of the film with a density of thought-provoking material, as well as the ever-widening scope that viewers are presented with.

Nobody really puts a foot wrong when it comes to the acting side of things (although Jones is just a little bit weaker than the others, due to her performance feeling more like a full-on performance at times). Brody fully deserves the second leading actor Academy Award that this gave him, Pearce is as good as he's been in anything from the past decade, and Cassidy, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Joe Alwyn, Jonathan Hyde, and Stacy Martin all do well in smaller roles that could have seen them easily overshadowed.

There's also some beautiful cinematography by Lol Crawley and a superb score from Daniel Blumberg, as well as many other positives I could mention from the technical side of things.

It's the ideas that will stick with you for a long time though. We've seen this kind of thing before, but not necessarily being viewed from these new angles. The Brutalist looks at the upheaval and losses caused by war, and it serves as a reminder that a genocide reverberates far beyond the list of those murdered by their oppressors. People change who they are, deliberately or not, and artists and tradespeople end up seeing a lot, if not all, of their work consigned to some historical dustbin. We lose people in a war, physical bodies broken and destroyed, but we also lose many minds and souls. It's hard to come up with some kind of ultimate total cost, but it's inevitably always a lot more than it might appear to be on paper. 

9/10

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The Night House (2020)

I haven't had much luck lately with a couple of interesting titles that I had hoped to enjoy, films that I presumed may have some horror genre tropes in the mix, even if they ended up playing out more like a straightforward drama or thriller. The Lost Daughter left me underwhelmed, as impressed as I was by Olivia Colman in it (who impresses me with everything she does), and now it's the turn of The Night House. This is much more of a simple genre piece, and moves further into absolute horror with each predictable bit of plot development, but it's yet another film not deserving enough of the central female performance (Rebecca Hall this time around).

Hall plays Beth, a teacher who is grieving the sudden death of her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit). Owen took a small boat into the middle of the lake beside their home and shot himself in the head. Beth is understandably pained and puzzled by this, having had no idea that Owen felt any such depths of despair. She starts to dig around into the life of the husband she starts to suspect she never really knew, all while being pushed on by some presence that visits her at night.

Directed by David Bruckner, who previously gave us the excellent The Ritual, as well as segments in both V/H/S and Southbound, this is a film that suffers from a script, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, stuffed full of familiar moments to anyone who has seen any popular supernatural thriller from the last few decades. It also feels unsure of itself, trying to play out as a supernatural-tinged drama for most of the runtime before diving fully into the potential horror of the situation when it feels like too little too late.

It's fortunate that Hall is in the lead role, she's an actress who has been delivering some great performances for some time now (although her project choice isn't on par with her talent, landing her in films as diverse as The Town, The Awakening, and, ummmmm, Holmes & Watson) and this is a fantastic turn from her. Her journey is depicted in a way that feels realistic and believable at all times. Sarah Goldberg is good support, playing a caring friend named Claire, but the other standout performance comes from Vondie Curtis-Hall, playing a neighbour/friend who doesn't want to see Beth's life undone by the grief she is processing. Stacy Martin also does well, playing a young woman named Madelyne who Beth finds after discovering photos of her on her deceased husband's phone. 

This isn't a bad film. It's just a film that doesn't have any faith in any direction it could take, and therefore seems to end up trying to do a bit of this and a bit of that, leading to end results that feel half-baked and half-hearted. Bruckner directs well enough, despite the fact that Collins and Piotrowski undermine things with a premise that feels very much like it could have been entitled The Entity That Jack Built.

5/10

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Mubi Monday: Vox Lux (2018)

The second feature from writer-director Brady Corbet, who has a filmography that also contains a number of acting roles from the past few couple of decades, Vox Lux is a film that suffers from a lack of focus. The annoying thing is that two central points that the movie revolves around are definitely a focus for the characters, but they're ultimately left too far in the background as we're left with a mediocre character study that doesn't have enough brilliance in either the script or the acting department to lift it up.

Having survived a horrific school shooting, Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) manages to use her new-found "fame" to build a career, one that has her singing alongside her sister, Eleanor (Stacy Martin). The first half of the movie shows the development of the two girls, as Celeste grows more and more into her role while Eleanor seems to fade into the background. We then cut forward by many years. Celeste (now played by Natalie Portman) is a bag of rock diva clichés, struggling to contain her nerves, her anger, and struggling to be the mother she might want to be to her daughter (Albertine, the second character played by Raffey Cassidy).

Although there may be a variety of influences here, the main ones would seem to be Nicolas Winding Refn (particularly in the third act, seeing how Portman's character performs her songs) and, strangely enough, Wes Anderson. Some people have already mentioned recognising the former, few have noted the latter, so it may just be my brain working improperly again. But the Willem Dafoe narration throughout, the problematic parenting, the low-key nature of scenes that could have easily been executed more bombastically, the mature behaviour of the young girls who are front and centre for the first half of the movie, and the very deliberate movements and carefully-considered speech of Portman (almost like a puppet at times when she has to be "on" for others) certainly had me thinking that there were enough similarities here with Anderson's usual checklist to make it worth noting.

People have been praising Portman's performance. I'm not sure why. She is bordering on the terrible here, helped in no way at all by the script. Celeste is that cartoonish idea of the personality you give a celebrity after you've met them once while they were having a bad day. Yes, there are darker depths and more interesting elements of her personality worth exploring, tied in with how her career began and what she has done to keep it going, but they are left aside as Corbet contents himself with moving from one soap opera moment to another. Both Martin and Cassidy do much better work, the latter excellent in both of her roles, although the second role is a much lesser one (where she feels like little more than a sounding board for her mother). Jude Law does alright with his turn, a savvy manager, and Jennifer Ehle does well in the few scenes that she has, playing the PR person handling a fairly difficult day. Both of those characters are also underdeveloped, but that's fine because they simply revolve around Celeste.

Corbet seems to be aiming for something more here. I'm sure there are others that have taken more from it. His biggest problem is his inability to identify and separate the better points to make from the trite moments. Indeed, he seems to absolutely confuse the two, spending much more time on the stale, weaker, material than on anything more thought-provoking and confrontational.

It looks pretty good throughout, and the very heart of the film makes it at least worth a watch, but this is ultimately a disappointing experience. I would recommend any of the movies from the other directors mentioned ahead of this, if you like their work, and I wouldn't be averse to the idea of someone one day taking this premise and reworking it into something more focused, and much better.

4/10

You will be able to buy it here.
Americans can buy it here.