We all need to accept that Brady Corbet believes in immersing audiences in the thick, fetid swamp of his own elephantine imaginings. Most of The Brutalist was mute nostril agony for me. But that was nothing compared to what’s coming.
For the last year or so Corbet has been cooking up a “get the whiteys!” racial revenge horror flick…a wokey-woke Chinese immigrant version of Killers of the Flower Moon but focused on the pain and trauma inflicted by whiteys upon Chinese silver mine and railroad workers back in the 19th Century, not through murder but by way of grueling work conditions and really shitty pay.
Descendents of Asian victims to white oppressors: You put our hard-working ancestors through hell back in the mid 1800s, not to mention the anti-Asian immigrant San Francisco race riot of 1877, and now it’s time for you, ya white motherfuckers, to suffer for your heartlessness and venality.”
Aaaannnddd Corbet’s film will reportedly run for over three and a half hours!
In a 2.17.25 interview on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast, Corbet said the film will mainly take place in the 1970s (i.e., the horror stuff) but “also spans 150 years.” (the historical Chinese immigrant stuff), except the Chinese Transcontinental railroad workers mainly suffered during the 1860s, so Corbet was wrong — he meant that it reaches back a century or thereabouts.
Will the Asian retribution arrive in the form of undead ghouls?
On 12.26.24 Filmofilia‘s Allan Ford, having listened to Corbet expound during a Toronto Lightbox q & a, wrote the following: “Inspired by Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, [Corbet’s next film] promises to juxtapose the visceral terror of horror with the emotional weight of immigration narratives.
“Set against the backdrop of 1970s California, Corbet’s ‘looser style’ aims to capture the era’s rugged, sun-drenched aesthetic while delving into the Chinese immigrant experience — a story rarely explored in Western cinema.”
19th century white railroad owners were cruel vicious shits, of course, but there’s no dimissing the suspicion that Corbet intends to deliver an Asian Killers of the Flower Moon with a Tobe Hooper-like horror overlay…evilwhiteyevilwhiteyEvilwhiteyevilwhiteyEvilwhiteyevilwhiteyEvilwhiteyevilwhitey….
“Chinese labor was integral to the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, which linked the railway network of the Eastern United States with California on the Pacific coast. Construction began in 1863 at the terminal points of Omaha, Nebraska and Sacramento, California, and the two sections were merged and ceremonially completed on May 10, 1869, at the famous “golden spike” event at Promontory Summit, Utah. It created a nationwide mechanized transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West. This network caused the wagon trains of previous decades to become obsolete, exchanging it for a modern transportation system.
“The building of the railway required enormous labor in the crossing of plains and high mountains by the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad, the two privately chartered federally backed enterprises that built the line westward and eastward respectively.
“In 1865 a large number of Chinese workers were recruited from the silver mines, as well as later contract workers from China. The idea for the use of Chinese labor came from the manager of the Central Pacific Railroad, Charles Crocker, who at first had trouble persuading his business partners of the fact that the mostly weedy, slender looking Chinese workers, some contemptuously called ‘Crocker’s pets’, were suitable for the heavy physical work.
“For the Central Pacific Railroad, hiring Chinese as opposed to whites kept labor costs down by a third, since the company would not pay their board or lodging. This type of steep wage inequality was commonplace at the time. Crocker overcame shortages of manpower and money by hiring Chinese immigrants to do much of the back-breaking and dangerous labor. He drove the workers to the point of exhaustion, in the process setting records for laying track and finishing the project seven years ahead of the government’s deadline.”
Posted on 2.12.25: If you could somehow magically migrate yourself into The Brutalist…if you could somehow penetrate that membrane and suddenly find yourself actually hanging with Adrien Brody‘s Laszlo Toth and all the rest of those miserable characters…if you could push a button that would allow you to actually gain entry to and live in their world…would you?
Answer: Of course you wouldn’t because (a) theirs is a grim, grief-stricken world…a morose “lemme outta here” underland if there ever was one, and (b) the characters aren’t “real” (by which I mean relatable in a recognizable, everyday, human being sense) but Brady Corbet constructs.
Living inside The Brutalist would be, in fact, hellish. That’s precisely how I felt as I watched it…trapped in a cold hell cave.