Fans are buzzing after getting their first look at a film dubbed the ‘next Oppenheimer’ and tipped for Oscars success in 2025 – which was made for under $10,000,000 (£7,702,765).
The Brutalist premiered at Venice Film Festival in early September, wowing critics across the board and emerging as the surprise runaway favourite for its staggering scope and performances.
And now its first trailer has been released, giving people a taste of filmmaker Brady Corbet’s bold style and the grand ‘American Dream’ scale of the movie.
With a cast led by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn and Alessandro Nivola also feature in this major awards-season contender that was made for a fraction of the cost of some of this year’s other hyped releases, such as Joker: Folie à Deux’s $200million (£154m) budget and Megalopolis’s $120m (£92.4m) price tag.
In my 4.5 star review for Metro, I called the nearly four-hour epic ‘compelling’, ‘enthralling’ and ‘the film to beat at the Oscars’ – as well as describing it as ‘a cinematic version of an Arthur Miller stage play’.
For many others, movie comparisons including The Godfather and There Will Be Blood were top of the mind – as well as Christopher Nolan’s intellectual blockbuster Oppenheimer, which won best picture at the 2024 Academy Awards.
‘Sometimes you begin to lose faith that we’ll ever get a certain kind of film again, and then something like Oppenheimer or The Brutalist comes along, and it fills you with enough relief to still hope for the next,’ tweeted associate editor for Roger Ebert, Robert Daniels, in reaction to The Brutalist’s trailer.
‘Baby, this is Oppenheimer level stuff. This is Orson Welles. This is the closest a filmmaker comes to kissing heaven,’ commented an enthusiastic Kyle Pinion at ScreenRex.
Co-incidentally, Oppenheimer’s budget was reported to have been $100m (£77m), so more than ten times that of The Brutalist.
In fact, this movie’s production budget was more specifically put at somewhere as low as between $6m (£4.6m) and $8m (£6.1m), according to Deadline, which is, quite frankly, miniscule by modern standards.
Others were also swooning over the trailer, which shares a taste of the film’s sweeping score and brief glimpses of Brody’s Hungarian-Jewish immigrant László Tóth, as he leaves behind the horrors of his past in post-World War Two Europe for a new life in America.
‘The way I teared up just experiencing the trailer again!’ wrote film programmer Jenny Nulf on X, while OB quipped: ‘A movie that ends with “ist” where Adrien Brody stars in [sic]? Yeah this about to be an Oscar.’
This is of course in reference to the 51-year-old star’s best actor win for The Pianist in 2003, when he became the youngest actor ever to win the award at the age of 29.
‘The Brutalist is my most anticipated movie of the year. Can’t wait to check it out,’ shared @jasperjay40, while @TazeWilson posted that he was ‘uncontrollably excited about this’ and film writer Will Bjarnar advised: ‘Film event of the year incoming.’
‘An American epic the likes of which we feared we’d never see again, let alone done at this magnitude,’ he added.
Other takes on The Brutalist – which currently has a stunning 97% score from critics on review aggregator sit Rotten Tomatoes – have seen it described as a ‘major moment in cinema’ and a ‘modern-day masterpiece’.
‘The Brutalist is an out-and-out masterpiece; a magnificent beast of a film with glorious set pieces and a gut punch ending, the most invigorating four hours I’ve spent in a cinema for years,’ tweeted Jonathan Dean of The Times as the trailer came out, echoing his colleague Kevin Maher’s review, which described the movie’s performances as ‘savagely good, with Pearce and Brody both on awards season form.’
Screen Rant’s Alex Harrison also promised that ‘every second is well spent’ of the film’s 215-minute runtime.
In The Brutalist, visionary architect László (Brody) and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America.
After a tough start in their new home country, their lives are changed forever by a mysterious and wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), as we follow them over a 30-year period.
Discussing the movie’s super-low budget openly, director Corbet has said that it wasn’t by choice.
‘We’re not reinventing the wheel. The reality is that we would have been happier and more comfortable if we had more money,’ he told the audience at a CAA screening for The Brutalist earlier this month.
‘It came at a great personal, physical expense at times because the number of sleepless nights in the last seven years. You have to have blind faith for getting this thing which is completely malnourished across the finish line,’ he added, as per Deadline.
The Brutalist premiered at Venice Film Festival on September 1. It releases in UK cinemas via Universal on January 24, 2025. It will hit US cinemas on December 20.
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