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SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for The Brutalist. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
If you have a few questions after watching the end of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, you should know that you’re not entirely alone. There is a certain level of ambiguity in the pre-epilogue conclusion of the story, which sees Felicity Jones’ Erzsébet Tóth confront Guy Pearce‘s Harrison Lee Van Buren about raping her husband and the accused man then mysteriously disappearing. The fate of Pearce’s character isn’t made totally clear in the movie – but according to co-star Joe Alwyn there was more clarity in the script than what is presented on the big screen.
In The Brutalist, the actor plays Harry Lee Van Buren, the son of Harrison Lee Van Buren, and in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he offers up some clarity about what happens to his on-screen father. At the end of the film, a search party canvasses the epic concrete construction designed by Adrien Brody’s László Tóth looking for Harrison, but we don’t see if their search is fruitful. Alwyn says that there was less mystery in the script, but he has no issue with how the material is presented:
I had a text from a friend asking me the same thing yesterday. I think in the script it’s probably clearer than is shown on screen. There is a line, maybe it’s even buried somewhere in the film, when they’re searching for him and someone says, ‘We found something.’ I don’t remember if it was as explicit as, ‘We found a body,’ but I think the implication is that he’s killed himself. But I quite like that it’s opaque, and you don’t end on a shot of him in this monument, dead. But yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what [the ending is].
Personally speaking, that was my takeaway from my screening of The Brutalist as well. The movie doesn’t ensure that the audience knows exactly what happens to Harrison Lee Van Buren, but the implication that he takes his own life are there.
But that isn’t the only question that Joe Alwyn has fielded about the end of The Brutalist, and he explains in the trade interview that he has also been asked about Harry’s extreme reaction to Erzsébet Tóth’s accusations. He didn’t consider that his character was also a victim of sexual assault by Harrison when he was shooting the movie, but he thinks it’s a valid thing to consider. Said Alwyn,
A couple of people have actually asked me about the moment between Harry and Erzsébet at the end, when he takes her out of the house. His reaction is so big to the accusations against his dad and a few people have said, is that because he has experienced something similar in the past? And it’s not something that I gave a huge amount of thought to while shooting it, but I found that an interesting commentary. It does make sense, I think, and it’s kind of threaded throughout, but it was never there in the script. Brady never said anything about it. There’s a mixture of anger and shock and shame, but perhaps there’s some kind of buried trauma there as well.
It’s an interesting take on just one particular element of The Brutalist, and cinephiles can likely expect to see a lot more takes about the movie in the coming months, as it has been widely celebrated and has arrived in theaters on a huge wave of buzz following fall festival screenings. The movie is now out in limited release as part of an award qualifying run, and it will be going nationwide in IMAX on January 24, 2025.