The first few minutes of The Brutalist features a quote from Goethe; 'None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free'. This sets up the rest of the film as a story of a talented immigrant artist pursuing a hopeless American dream - a story with which we are all familiar. The Brutalist, however, offers more than just a fictional story of disillusionment.
Visionary Hungarian architect László Tóth falls into the employment of a rich industrialist,…