Brady Corbet is the most interesting discovery of the Venice Film Festival

Brady Corbet is an American director who, until recently, was mostly known among cinema enthusiasts. However, thanks to his third and most recent film The Brutalist, he may soon become a well-known name to the general public. Presented in competition at the latest Venice Film Festival, The Brutalist was very well received by critics, to the extent that most observers considered it the likely winner of the Golden Lion. The award, however, went to Pedro Almodóvar, the famous Spanish director and screenwriter who presented The Room Next Door in Venice, while Brady Corbet was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Direction – the second most important award of the festival. At the premiere, the film received a thirteen-minute standing ovation; for this reason, Universal, which will handle its worldwide distribution, already considers it one of the titles to watch for the Oscar campaign. The distribution rights for North America were instead acquired by A24, for around ten million dollars, demonstrating the high expectations for this film. The Brutalist has been described by those who have seen it as a monumental film, making Brady Corbet one of the most interesting discoveries of this year's Venice Film Festival – and the first reviews published on Letterboxd are very positive.

What is The Brutalist about?

The Brutalist tells the story of a Hungarian Jewish architect, Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), who survived the concentration camps and later arrived in America, where he begins working on the troubled construction of an imposing building. The title of the film derives from the architectural movement with which the protagonist aligns: brutalism. The film features a fictional character, but to create him, the personalities and styles of three important architects were combined: Americans Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn, and Hungarian Marcel Breuer. The Brutalist was conceived by Corbet about ten years ago, before any of his other films, and it took over five years to shoot, with multiple cast changes and frequent interruptions due to funding issues. Despite appearing to be a very expensive film, it was financed with a relatively limited budget by American standards – between ten and twenty million dollars. The Brutalist runs for three and a half hours, but there is an interval halfway through the film, which is integrated into the film so it doesn’t interrupt the screening: for fifteen minutes, there is a countdown indicating the start of the second act, along with background music. This choice mirrors the screening methods of major films from the 1950s and essentially allows viewers to take a break – considered by Corbet to be a legitimate necessity.

Where does Brady Corbet come from?

Before The Brutalist, Corbet had directed Vox Lux, presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2018: the film tells the story of a highly successful musician (Natalie Portman) who suffers a sexual assault during a tour. His directorial debut was with Childhood of a Leader, adapted from the novel of the same name by Jean-Paul Sartre, which explores the life path of a dictator from an imaginary Western country through three moments that correspond to the protagonist’s outbursts of anger. This film was also presented in Venice, in the Horizons section of 2015, where it won the Best Direction award. Corbet is 36 years old, and he is quite young to have already participated in a prestigious festival like Venice three times. His screenplays are all co-written with his wife, Mona Fastvold, a former actress and director well-known especially in Norway. Corbet also started working in cinema as an actor, in small TV series and as a voice actor for animated cartoons; he later appeared in several films as an actor, including the remake of Funny Games by Michael Haneke and Melancholia by Lars Von Trier. Notably, Corbet did not follow the typical path in Hollywood that leads to making feature films like The Brutalist. Moreover, the fact that he is one of the few American directors shooting on film rather than digital already indicates how uninterested he is in becoming a “commercial” director in the future.