Is 'The Brutalist' based on a true story? All about the Oscar-winning movie’s real-life inspirations (2025)

The Brutalist follows a Holocaust survivor and architect named László Tóth, a character so well-written (and well-acted by Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar for his performance) that many audience members entered its much-discussed intermission thinking it was a biopic. It was Lydia Tár all over again.

But, no, László is not real, nor is Brady Corbet's acclaimed epic a true story in the traditional sense. Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, stitched together their tale from a vast assortment of historical figures and events, as well as books, places, and their own experience.

What is The Brutalist about?

Clocking in at a whopping 215 minutes,The Brutalist finds successful architect and Holocaust survivor László, a Hungarian Jew, reduced to poverty and drug addiction after fleeing Europe in the late 1940s.

His career is revived after he's financed by wealthy and eccentric industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who commissions him to design and build a community center near his Pennsylvania estate. Van Buren also pulls the strings to bring László's Erzsébet (Jones) and Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) from Europe to America.

But László encounters many obstacles after construction begins, many of them perpetuated by Harrison himself, whose twisted relationship with László comes to represent the darkest parts of the immigrant experience.

Is The Brutalist based on a true story?

The Brutalist is not based on a true story, but Corbet has spoken extensively about the many real-world architects, authors, and even places that influenced the film.

Speaking with the Austin Chronicle, the director cited architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, who also served as an advisor on The Brutalist, as an influence. Specifically, it was Cohen's Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War that helped the story's themes come into focus. "It's all about postwar architecture and postwar psychology, and how the two were intertwined," he said. It was also integral in leading Corbet deciding on brutalism as "the perfect allegory to talk about postwar trauma."

Another important influence was Hilary Thimmesh's Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir. The 2011 book is about the creation of Saint John's Abbey in the woods of Minnesota, and it focuses on the highs and lows of the architect-client relationship. Also, Breuer, the architect at the center of the book, was, like László, a Bauhaus-trained architect from Hungary who began his career in furniture design.

The pivotal early scene in which László designs a library for Van Buren was partly inspired by the disastrous creation of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. "I'm fascinated by projects that have gone completely off the rails," Corbet told the Chronicle. "They had done this building in glass, from floor to ceiling. It was only after many years of people having turned the key on the project that the folks at the Bibliothèque showed up and said, 'We can't store anything here because there's sunlight in every direction.' So what they ended up having to do was curtain the entire building."

Another inspiration was Carrara, the Italian town that's home to the massive marble quarry that serves as the setting for one of The Brutalist's most upsetting scenes.

"Carrara is a super disturbing place," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "Apparently, there's enough marble in those hills to last us roughly 500 years — to tile our bathrooms and ornament our kitchens. But 500 years to deplete all of the world's marble is not very long. When you go there, you can see and feel that we have literally taken a bite out of the earth. So Carrera is indicative of what Western capitalism has done to the planet — how we are trying to possess that which is not possessable. The same way that patrons exploit artists. So Carrera is very important in the film, because it's a visual allegory that’'s very tangible. You can feel that ominous exploitative energy. And this is a story about a capitalist and the artist he has decided to possess."

Is The Brutalist's László Tóth based on a real person?

While László Tóth is not a real person, Corbet revealed the character was inspired by a number of real-life architects. We previously mentioned Breuer, who shares a number of traits with The Brutalist's protagonist, but another important figure for Corbet was László Moholy-Nagy, another Hungarian architect who served as a professor at the Bauhaus school. Other notable inspirations included Brutalist architect Paul Rudolph and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a German-American architect who, like László, emigrated to the U.S. to escape Nazism.

Also, there was a real-life Hungarian named László Tóth, though he was a geologist, not an architect. Interestingly, his claim to fame was using a hammer to knock the nose and arm off ofMichelangelo's Pietà statue in 1972. In her review of The Brutalist, Los Angeles Times critic Amy Nicholson cleverly pointed out how Michelangelo ran up against his benefactors in much the same way as the film's László.

"That's just a coincidence," Fastvold told USA Today. “László Tóth is like John Smith in Hungary — it's one of the most common names. We've spent a lot of time in Hungary, so that name just felt good for a Hungarian character."

What is brutalism?

As defined by Architecture and Design, brutalism is a style of architecture that "prioritizes function over form, and stripped-back minimalism over flashy design." It tends to feature "visually heavy edifices with geometric lines, solid concrete frames, exaggerated slabs, double height ceilings, massive forbidding walls, exposed concrete, and a predominantly monochrome palette," and thus "establishes the right of building materials and structural features to be seen, admired and even celebrated." Other adjectives used to describe Brutalism? "Cold" and "menacing."

It was most popular between the 1950s and the 1980s, though Corbet told the Chronicle that "there were seeds of it in 1925, through the Weimar, and into the 1950s.”

Speaking with Script Magazine, he said, "Brutalism, for me, felt like the correct visual allegory for exploring post-war trauma because it is a style of post-war architecture that came about in the 1950s and feels very much in dialogue with the previous period of the two World Wars."

He elaborated on that point to The Hollywood Reporter, saying, "This movement all came out of the Bauhaus... their work was all wrestling with what the entire world had been through in the first half of the century. So, the film is about how post-war psychology shaped post-war architecture. Even many of the materials that were used to construct these buildings — a lot of it was developed for wartime. These buildings would not exist if it were not for the trauma that so much of the world went through."

"Obviously, brutalism is also incredibly cinematic," Fastvold added to Script. "The idea that you are constantly working with light, using minimalism and maximalism in a way, to sort of guide your eye to something quite specific. And how immersive the experiences of being in a room that’s so naked and bare, like emerging from the darkness and into the light."

Where can I watch The Brutalist?

The Brutalist is currently playing in theaters and available to buy via Amazon Prime, Apple, and Fandango at Home.

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