A monolith. If one had to distill the essence of Brady Corbet’s "The Brutalist" into a single word, this would be it. A monolith of pure cinema, imposing and angular, shot in a 70mm black and white that doesn't caress forms so much as sculpt them, etching them with the precision of a chisel on stone. It is a work that does not ask to be loved, but demands to be contemplated, circumnavigated, almost studied in its austere and sorrowful grandeur. Like the cathedrals of reinforced concrete its protagonist dreams of erecting, the film itself is an architecture of the soul, a filmic edifice in which every frame is a buttress, every silence a great span supporting the crushing weight of memory.

The story of László Toth, played by a hollowed-out, almost transfigured Adrien Brody, is a chronicle of reconstruction. A survivor of the unspeakable horrors of a Europe in flames, a Hungarian architect of genius whose modernist vision was suffocated by barbarism, Toth lands in post-war America with his wife Erzsébet (a sorrowful and brilliantly lucid Felicity Jones). He is not just seeking refuge; he is seeking a space, a tabula rasa upon which to project the order, rationality, and permanence that history has denied him. America, with its promise of an unlimited future, seems the perfect canvas for his dream of a constructed utopia. But Corbet, an intellectual and ruthless filmmaker, is not interested in a hagiography of the American Dream. His gaze is that of a seismograph registering the subterranean tremors that undermine the foundations of that mythological edifice.

The most immediate parallel, almost bait for the lazy critic, would be with Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead." Both are architects, both uncompromising visionaries. But this would be a fallacious analogy, a critical heresy. Roark is a philosophical abstraction, a hypertrophy of the Nietzschean ego that bends the world to its will. Toth, by contrast, is a broken man whose will is a scar. His ambition is not a life drive, but a reaction to trauma, a desperate attempt to impose a monumental and indestructible form upon the shapeless chaos of his past. His structures are not hymns to the individual, but mausoleums to memory, fortresses against oblivion. If Roark builds to affirm the self, Toth builds to bury a self that no longer exists.

When the Mephistophelian and wealthy client Harrison Van Buren (a mellifluous and impenetrable Guy Pearce) offers him the commission of a lifetime, the Faustian bargain is struck. Van Buren doesn't just buy a design; he buys his architect's soul, his obsession, his pain. The clash between the two is not merely between artist and patron, but between two different conceptions of power: the power to create from nothing and the power to possess what has been created. In this dynamic, the film moves away from the coming-of-age story to become a Greek tragedy in a suit and tie, an exploration of hubris and its inevitable nemesis.

Corbet orchestrates this descent with a formal command that is simply staggering. The choice of black and white is not an aesthetic affectation, but a statement of intent. It is the language of photographic memory, of the historical document, but also of German Expressionist cinema, with its violent contrasts that translate an inner conflict into image. The compositions, rigorous and often symmetrical, imprison the characters within oppressive geometries, transforming spaces into extensions of their psychological state. One feels the echo of Kubrick in the glacial management of space and time, but with a human warmth, however faint, that was often foreign to the master of "2001."

The title itself is a keystone. Brutalism, from béton brut (raw concrete), is not an aesthetic of brutality, but of material honesty. Leaving the concrete exposed, bearing the imprints of its formwork, means revealing the construction process, the building's structural "truth." Corbet's film likewise exposes the scars of its protagonist. His psyche is a Brutalist work: harsh, bare, marked by the violence of its "construction," yet possessing its own solemn, terrible beauty. In this, the film finds an unexpected fellow traveler not so much in cinema, but in the literature of W.G. Sebald. As in "Austerlitz," here too architecture and memory merge into a single, painful archaeology of the soul, where every building is a repository for untold stories and unquiet ghosts.

The score by Scott Walker, the last from the great and lamented musician, is the perfect sonic counterpoint to this vision. It is not a soundtrack, but a seismic entity, a series of atonal and operatic soundscapes that do not underscore emotion but create it from the depths, like a lament emerging from the very foundations of the images. It is the hoarse breath of a world that has lost its harmony.

"The Brutalist" is a demanding work, one that shuns any easy catharsis. It offers no answers, but raises questions as heavy as granite blocks. Can art redeem? Or is it just a more sophisticated way of monumentalizing one's own pain? Does the construction of a new world inevitably require the destruction of the inner one? The film does not judge its protagonist, but subjects him to an autoptic dissection, showing how the dream of a utopia can become a personal prison, an architectural masterpiece built upon the ruins of a life.

In a cinematic landscape dominated by digital sleekness and consoling narratives, "The Brutalist" stands with the force of an anomaly, a work from another time, projected into our present with the impact of a warning. It is a film that stays with you, that continues to work under your skin, forcing us to question the price of creation and the indelible nature of the foundations, both visible and invisible, upon which we build our lives. An austere, necessary, unforgettable masterpiece. A true monolith in the history of contemporary cinema.