I believed, as I sat down to watch The Brutalist, that Brady Corbet's newest feature was about construction. After all, it follows the life of László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who comes to America in the wake of World War II, in hopes of starting over. How could a film about an architect and his family creating a new life be about anything other than construction?

In many regards, construction is exactly what The Brutalist is about. We watch as Tóth (played by the singular Adrien Brody) is tasked with building furniture, a library, and a community center. Meanwhile he, and those in his proximity, are using their manufactured identities to hide secrets, their work to smuggle discreet goals, their lives to craft legacies.

And while the first half of the film is all about building, what the film's second half (distinctly separated in theaters by a 15 minute intermission) made clear to me is that The Brutalist may be devoted to showing us construction, but it's about the counterfactual: The Brutalist is a story of desecration, in fear and in reality.

The film opens with a montage of László Tóth's journey from war-ravaged Europe to Ellis Island, beneath the narration of a letter from Tóth's wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who remains in a work camp on the Eastern front. It is well understood from this breathtaking opening sequence that this is a family torn asunder by the Holocaust and that Tóth is but one of thousands who will have to start from a place well below square one.

But the horrors of the second World War rained upon the Tóth family, the Jewish people, and Tóth's native Budapest predates the first act of The Brutalist. That destruction, while off-screen, casts a long shadow over the rest of the film.

Once in America, László Tóth is repeatedly met with the accusation of desecration. A reading room, a marriage, American society - nowhere is off limits from the fear of contamination. God forbid something "threaten" this great, big, beautiful thing that these hard working “American” folks have created. It's only when these accusers can profit off of Tóth that they embrace him – or at least his ability – with more open arms.

The most notable of these adversaries-turned-allies is Harrison Van Buren (an impeccable Guy Pearce), a Pennsylvanian oligarch who only realizes the beauty in Tóth's designs after he himself is heralded for being a "modern man" for owning the library Tóth redesigned. The relationship between Van Buren and Tóth comes to define the film. For Van Buren, Tóth is a pet, a show piece, an exotica with a creativity that Van Buren is admittedly lacking. For Tóth, Van Buren is both his life support, but also a means to an end. The film's central relationship is one of a predatory patron and an indentured artist -- and given Brady Corbet's continual sermons on final cut, the obvious reading of The Brutalist here is one of creative licensing.

If that is the dominant reading for industry workers and their studio heads, that's great. More movies would benefit from their creators, rather than financiers, overseeing their vision all the way to the end. Likewise, this narrative The Brutalist is highlighting offers moviegoers a rare opportunity to see, in great detail, the level of craftsmanship that goes on behind the screen.

Yes, Pearce and Brody's performances are complex and outstanding, and the film is undoubtedly beautiful to look at, but The Brutalist excels above the average double digit Oscar nominee (though, those films are often anything but average) because it has such a simple, yet brilliantly executed lesson at the heart of its story: the artist should control their art, through and through.

But the narrative that surrounds that lesson becomes more complicated when the film's second half comes around to redefine the construction of the first half. (It's safe to say: major spoilers abound.)

As soon as László Tóth and Harrison Van Buren – and their accompanying audience – have settled into a steady pace of constructing an ambitious community center (one equipped with a library, gymnasium, theater, and chapel), the cracks in both plan and execution begin to show. The construction is marred with pitfalls and setbacks in the film's second half, all of which threaten each character's individual goals.

Tóth is continually derailed, first by the arrival of his silent niece and wife from Europe, who to his surprise is wheelchair-bound with osteoporosis. Thus, Tóth's crafted vision of a fresh, easier life with his wife and niece is all but entirely shattered. Respectively, Erzsébet and Zsófia's lives are likewise befouled by circumstance.

Erzsébet Tóth, just as much a scholar as her husband and a renowned journalist in her own right, is not only bound by her wheelchair but her husband's isolated home at the Van Buren residence, next to his construction site. She yearns for a fulfilling life - one where she can employ her venerated skill as a writer. Even so, when she finally does relocate herself to New York City to work, her dream has been relegated to fashion listicles and puff pieces in a "women's journal." Erzsébet stoically settles for being chopped down.

As Erzsébet battles to keep her dream alive, Zsófia is besieged with unwanted sexual advances by the entitled Van Buren son, Harry (Joe Allwyn). To capitulate to him is to violate her own body, to speak out is to violate her own silence. Once again, we are faced with the looming hand of defilement.

And while The Brutalist's second half is littered with even more examples of such debasement, or the threat thereof, (a "second opinion" architect named Jim seeking to undermine Tóth's vision, or so he believes; a literal train derailment that threatens the build; even the off-screen colonization of Palestine), it is actualized most viciously in two of the film's best sequences.

In the first, deep in the marble-mined tunnels of Carrara, the raping of László Tóth by Harrison Van Buren is literalized. After two-plus hours, the shackles of metaphor are thrown off in a callous, though beautifully staged, sequence. The shaky cam, the intoxicated grunts, the blinding of the light the next morning make for a visceral, stomach-churning sequence – and one that captures best what The Brutalist is actually about. There, in the mines, the root of this construction, is the greatest desecration of them all. We begin to realize, the greater the construct, the more brutal the violation.

This rule, however, goes both ways, for the second half's final sequence is a culmination of the Van Burens' transgressions descending upon them. In a (now Oscar-nominated) turn, Felicity Jones' Erzsébet appears at the Van Buren manor unannounced, interrupting a family dinner with the project's fundraisers. Standing on her own two feet, with the aid of a walker, Erzsébet stares down Van Buren and decries him for being an "evil rapist." Her denouncement does not go unheard. As she is violently dragged out of the dining room by Harry, she continues her dethroning of Pennsylvania's great baron.

Van Buren, as much an architect as any – though of a reputation, not a community center – cannot handle the shame of honesty. So, he disappears. And while the younger Van Burens search for him, Corbet leaves it to the audience to decide how Harrison's destruction ultimately finds him.

But just as we believe the film to end, a well built tale of construction and deconstruction, an epilogue appears. This epilogue, taking place decades later in Venice, under the narration of a matured and not-so-silent Zsófia, has brought with it quite the controversy. Some hate it, some love it, most question it. I, for one, found it illuminating.

We are swept away for only a few minutes into a lifetime achievement ceremony for our now wheelchair bound László Tóth. His greatest works line the walls, and we find out that after decades away from the project, the community center Tóth was so dead set on constructing "his way" was finally completed, his way. So too, do we find out that the center was a Trojan horse – designed to resemble the concentration camps that scarred the Tóths. Suddenly, it is no wonder now why László was belligerently opposed to his designs being altered.

We find that Erzsébet has passed, her last appearance on screen: dragged, after finally standing, sacrificing her husband's work, her family's well being, and, of course, the Van Burens for a righteous cause. Tóth, now a widow, sits in his wheelchair as his niece addresses the crowd. And in the words of a patron, not an artist, Zsófia delivers the film’s final line: "No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”

A sick joke pulled on us and Tóth alike, as we know very well from what we've seen, that the destination only exists because of the journey that made it. Nonetheless, that is what we are left with.

The Brutalist ends with a message of twisted interpretation, one that not only fails to capture László Tóth's legacy, but retroactively reduces it to a novelty tourist attraction. How can such a film end with such a sacrilegious thesis statement?

I understand why many protest this ending. Unfortunately, we, as an audience, are as incapacitated as László himself. We can do nothing to stop this ending. We've been had. But, it was Brady Corbet who had us. And he always meant to.

For, as I've said many times now, this isn't a film about construction, it's one about desecration. Who better to show us that than the film's chief architect? He built it, why shouldn't he vandalise it? Is that not, after all, why Corbet decided to end the film with a line that so blatantly misses the mark? Or why the stylized VistaVision cinematography of the previous three and a half hours is thrown out for '80's camcorder? Or why the film cuts to an askew credits, not by the sounds of the beautiful orchestra we've been lulled with, but the smashing Italian disco song "One for You, One for Me?"

Corbet and his incredible crew of architects built us a great epic on the power of artistic construction. Then, he defaced it, and he did so on purpose. The flaw in Corbet's construction was in the design. We just couldn't see it until the very end. And that, in my opinion, is what elevates The Brutalist from a great epic to an exceptional one.

Zsófia, in commemorating László Tóth, missed the mark, but Brady Corbet didn't. From the moment he inverted the Statue of Liberty — the preeminent artistic symbol of “America” — in the film’s opening sequence, to the final needle-dropping act of desecration, Corbet was in control. He fulfilled his blueprint, flaws and all. For, sacrilege is the thesis statement.

"The Brutalist" And My Admiration For The Desecration Of A Masterpiece