Director Brady Corbet’s period drama, The Brutalist, is blazing through awards season. Since releasing in late 2024 in the US (and early 2025 in the UK), The Brutalist has earned an impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Although it’s one of 2024’s longest movies, with a runtime of 215 minutes, reviews of The Brutalist are overwhelmingly positive. And The Brutalist has some incredible performances; indeed, Adrien Brody has been nominated for Best Actor for his performance as László Tóth. Felicity Jone’s performance as László’s wife, Erzsébet, also stood out even among the other powerful performances by The Brutalist‘s cast.

Intense performances like these make it easy to believe in the reality of the story taking place on screen. At their best, films make their audiences forget that what they are watching is narrative, not reality, and The Brutalist certainly achieved that goal. The stories of László and Erzsébet are intense and believable, so it is easy to ᴀssume that László is an unsung genius of the twentieth century. Theatergoers who walked out of The Brutalist and searched the internet for the historical story of László Tóth, however, were in for a surprise.

The Brutalist Is Not Based On A Specific True Story

But There Is Truth In The Brutalist

There was no Hungarian-Jewish architect, László Tóth. Although the performances in The Brutalist are grippingly lifelike, the characters being portrayed never existed in reality. It is important to note that The Brutalist itself never claims anything else; there are no “based on a true story” disclaimers or “based on the biography by…” credits in The Brutalist. On the contrary, characters like Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) would have been important political or social figures, simply by dint of wealth, so the fact that his name did not ring any bells should clearly have signaled that The Brutalist is a work of fiction.

Nevertheless, the world of The Brutalist is real. So, although The Brutalist is not based on a specific true story, there is truth to the stories The Brutalist tells. There was no Hungarian-Jewish architect named László Tóth who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to America, but hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were persecuted in the Holocaust, and some survivors did immigrate to America, going on to do great things in their adopted home. László and Erzsébet may not have been separated in real life, but countless real families were. It is the truth in The Brutalist that makes the film so compelling.

The Real Laszlo Toth Was Not An Architect Like In The Brutalist

There Are Many Lazlo Toths, But None Of Them Are Architects

On the other hand, however, there was a real Hungarian man named “Laszlo Toth” or “László Tóth.” In fact, there have been at least six Laszlo Toths. Three “László Tóth”s were athletes: one played water polo for Hungary in the Olympics, one plays soccer for a Hungarian football club, and the third is a racecar driver competing as recently as the summer of 2024. László Fejes Tóth was a mathematician born in 1915, and László Tahi Tóth was an award-winning Hungarian actor who pᴀssed away in 2018. Clearly, there is not an architect among them.

The most infamous Laszlo Toth was born in Hungary in 1938 but moved to Australia as an adult in 1965. Although he trained as a geologist, Toth struggled with English and worked in a soap factory in Australia. Unlike László, ​Toth was raised Catholic, and throughout his time in Australia, he became convinced that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. In ​​​​​​1971, Toth moved to Italy where he wrote letters to the Pope to gain recognition as Christ, and when this failed, Toth vandalized Michelangelo’s Pietà statue of Mary, knocking off one arm and her nose before being subdued.

Unsurprisingly, Laszlo Toth was internationally infamous. He’s been referenced in TV shows and has inspired two books. Prior to The Brutalist, the statue-vandalizing geologist was easily the most famous Laszlo Toth. As such, it’s worth considering how the real Laszlo Toth relates to the fictional László Tóth. Themes of religion, art, and mental health run throughout The Brutalist. It’s ironic that a Jewish man who builds a marble church shares a name with a Christian man who destroyed a Christian statue. Regardless of how many of the parallels are intentional, there are echoes of Laszlo Toth in The Brutalist‘s László Tóth.

The Brutalist Is Inspired By The Brutalism Architecture Style From The 1950s

And There Were Brutalist Architects Like László Tóth

While László Tóth, the brutalist architect, is fictional, Brutalism is a very real architectural style. In The Brutalist, László tells his patron, Harrison, that he studied at the Bauhaus, an incredibly influential German art school. The Bauhaus was the cradle of Modernism, and the chair that László designs early in The Brutalist is nearly identical to actual chairs designed by Bauhaus-trained artist, Heinrich Neuy. While the Bauhaus was famous for Modernist art and architecture, not Brutalism, that same Modernist movement was the direct progenitor of Brutalism.

In the 1950s, a group of (mostly British) Modernist architects developed Brutalism. But Brutalism’s more than just an architectural style, it’s also a philosophical approach to the material world. Prominent Brutalist architect, Reyner Banham, explained that a structure can be evaluated as “Brutalist” based on three qualities, “1, Formal legibility of plan; 2, clear exhibition of structure, and 3, valuation of materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found’.” In other words, Brutalism cares about material as it exists, not as it can be used, and Brutalism insists that buildings should serve a clear purpose for the humans who use them.

Brutalism also arose, in no small part, as a backlash against the most popular architecture of the 1930s and 40s, nostalgia. A great deal of European architecture at that time was built on references to European history, especially in Nazi Germany. Fascist movements relied upon gestures of past glory to justify present atrocities, and that was clearly reflected in the architecture of the time. Many Brutalist architects were persecuted by the Nazis, and hyper-modern Brutalist architecture was designed as a clear refutation of Fascist ideology.

Brutalist architect Ernő Goldfinger is the closest thing to a real-life László Tóth. Like László, Goldfinger was both Jewish and Hungarian, and he and his wife fled the Nazis in Hungary. Goldfinger, however, fled to Britain, not America. Furthermore, Goldfinger got his start in Britain not from a wealthy patron, like Harrison, but from the British Communist Party. In the epilogue of The Brutalist, László’s lifetime of accomplishments is revealed, and those accomplishments parallel Goldfinger’s in the real world. While The Brutalist may not be based on Ernő Goldfinger’s real life, he is the closest parallel to László.

Why The Brutalist Feels Like It Is Based On A True Story

It’s Reminiscent Of A Famous Biopic

Given that neither Laszlo Toth, the geologist, nor Ernő Goldfinger, the Brutalist architect, is the basis for The Brutalist, it is worth considering why the film feels so much like it’s based on a true story. Some of that is stylistic; the cinematography in The Brutalist looks a lot like the cinematography in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 biopic, Oppenheimer. And the parallels between The Brutalist and Oppenheimer are more than stylistic. Both László Tóth and J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reckon with their Jewishness in the face of ᴀssimilation, so there’s a thematic overlap.

Another similarity is how both László’s and Oppenheimer’s geniuses are shown in the language of film. The intricacies of either architecture or nuclear physics would be difficult to impossible to show clearly on screen, so in both Oppenheimer and The Brutalist, the directors opted for surreal stylized sequences to convey the creative process. Also, it’s worth noting that Oppenheimer is also incredibly long, with a 180-minute runtime. Given the thematic and cinematographic parallels with the most recent epic biopic, it is hardly surprising that The Brutalist felt it might be based on real history.