The Brutalist: How to Tell Our Stories of Immigration

On the world’s biggest stage, Adrien Brody, rosy with emotion, accepted the Oscar for Best Actor and uttered the words Jewish people all over the world were hoping to hear.

I watched alone, scared that the evening’s contentious nature would spike my already high blood pressure. Brody paused lightly—not in hesitation—before saying the word “antisemitism.” No, it wasn’t hesitation. His pause felt like the pause before lifting a heavy object, knowing that he could not fix the issues, but could stand there and tell his fellow Jews, “I know. I see.”

For me, there had been hesitation. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to watch The Brutalist until now. It’s difficult to sell a film about the Holocaust. Difficult, still, to get viewers to buy tickets. The themes, though far-reaching, have needed reinventing to reach new audiences. Studio executives know this. Before the strike, I had the immense privilege of working on A Small Light, a mini-series about Miep Gies and the people who kept Anne Frank, her family, and four others hidden for most of WWII. The showrunners, Joan Rater and Tony Phelan, along with their Development Executive, Kate Wagener, worked tirelessly to take this story to the world. National Geographic had said they weren’t taking more Holocaust stories at the moment. A Small Light, which told the story of Anne Frank as a refugee from Germany who was protected by Otto Frank’s immigrant secretary, changed their minds.

Still from the film, The Brutalist

In 2024, I found myself working in education at the Museum of Tolerance and talking about Anne Frank to children who had never met a Jew before. Some of these kids, however, knew immigration either first-hand or through their parents. I would ask them about what languages they thought Anne Frank spoke and show them pictures of her diary, where you could see Anne writing in both her native German and Dutch (before she edited with the intention of publishing).

Jewish history has been marked by immigration, even if that’s not what we connect the word to as today’s headlines flood our feeds. Our Jewish experience may not be universal, but immigrants of all backgrounds carry similar lived experiences. Parents teaching children letters of alphabets that they do not yet know themselves. Cultural pleasantries exposing us. Explaining accents. Biting tongues. Praying a helping hand will lead us to safety and not to a debt that demands to be repaid.

The Brutalist is divided into two starkly different parts by an intermission. The first has Laszlo, fresh off the boat, staring at Lady Liberty herself. His anguish, his impatience, his lack of direction all land him in a job he resents, with few prospects in sight as he writes to his wife he believes he’ll never see again.

Things change when Lazslo’s talents draw strange friends who wish to benefit from his architecture skills. These new friends have connections and can bring Erszebet, his wife, and Zsofia, their young niece, across the pond with enough resources for a dignified life. Laszlo’s own well-being was not enough to indebt himself to men he distrusted, but his family’s well-being is.

After Erzsebet and Zsofia arrive, the family is invited to lunch with Lazslo’s strange business partners. As they break bread as hosts and guests, as benefactor and beneficiary, the benefactor in question taunts Lazslo for his accent and throws a coin at him. Worst of all, he then suggests Lazslo pick up the coin and pass it to him. The moment slows down. The tension increases as Laszlo bends down for the coin ritardando, slow enough that you can’t help but imagine it violently leaving his hand and landing squarely between his benefactor’s eyes. Instead, Lazslo stiffly places it back in his fingertips, aware of the role he must play.

I’m certain that, regardless of our immigration status, we must have all felt moments such as these. When I was about ten years old, my mother came home from a much-anticipated job interview, tears built up in her eyes that could not sit still as I greeted her, eager to know how it had gone. My father held her. The interviewer had loved her resume. He had not felt the same way about her accent.

The immigrant may be seen but not heard. They may serve, but they should never ask for anything in return. Not sympathy. Not understanding. Not fair pay. Not decency. Not humanity. Not certainty.

Lazslo carries on. He nods. He cannot bring himself to smile, so he nods. It goes against his nature to do so. The burden, along with an injury he sustained before he could afford medicine, leads him to a heroin addiction that is, at first, quiet. You would not label The Brutalist a film about addiction, though the comfort Lazslo finds in it takes startling turns.

On a business trip with his benefactor, Lazslo does too much, stumbling down Italian back alleys as his body rejects the drug. The benefactor searches for him as the night comes to an end and finds him hunched over, physically manifesting the vulnerable state Lazslo has been in since accepting the benefactor’s help. In an almost swift move unexpected by the audience, the benefactor undoes his belt, then Lazslo’s, and takes advantage of the man he’s been humiliating and helping for years. This physical manifestation, Lazslo’s rape, visceral and nauseating, becomes one more thing Lazslo has no choice but to accept.

This is not every immigrant story, though it is not unheard of. The protagonists, our heroes, are Jews who have survived the worst humanity has to offer. Immigrating to the United States, though an opportunity for new beginnings, was the beginning of another story, as it was and is for so many. My own immigration story serves as a drive, an ember within me that points me to moral clarity, to purpose, to speak. Immigrants have, are, and will be the driving force of every nation, the taboo headline, the vulnerable hands who do what others cannot. What colors an immigration story is not what those who have not lived it can imagine. How can anyone hope to understand what it is like to walk in a vulnerability that no coat, no position, no salary, can protect?

Erzsebet suffers from osteoporosis due to the famine she lived through in the camps before coming to the US. This jolts her into intense bouts of uncontrollable pain that Lazslo feels powerless to handle. In an act of mercy and desperation, he grabs his heroin and needle to ease Erzsebet’s pain. Then, he turns to himself.

Lazslo and Erzsebet bond over this moment, and for the first time since they’ve been back together, are able to be intimate with each other and share a brief moment of bliss before Erzsebet nearly overdoses.

The tragedy in this film does not befall our protagonists. That entails swiftness. In a powerful moment of strength, Erzsebet, having decided to make Aliyah and no longer beholden to the benefactor’s desires, confronts him for what he did to her husband. Her heroism and resolve are the last we see of her and this storyline, as what follows is an epilogue; their Zsofia speaking publicly in honor of Erzsebet and Lazslo’s achievements.

This story begins as it ends, with immigration bookending the film. Immigration is not a singular event. It changes your condition, your status. It colors all future experiences.  In the Epilogue, we understand that the family— Lazlo, Erzsebet, Zsofia—find home in the newly established state of Israel. It is not, however, falsely sold to us as a happy ending. Immigration to the young Jewish State was not easy. Resources scarce, fear of war looming, a rug rat government discovering how to govern. The filmmakers made a deliberate choice not to show, or hint, at what life in Israel may have been like for Lazslo. While it would at least position them differently in society, the vulnerability of immigration and the conditions of this new country would not have given the audience the victorious, hands-to-the-sky ending we hope for.

I have been an immigrant longer than I have been most things. Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of that, and not a room I step into without it. At times, my Standard American accent has felt shameful—a lie I learned when English words first left my lips. I say that lie every time I introduce myself: on dates, on walks with my dog, at job interviews as I smile, shake hands, and feel my mother’s wounds.

It is fitting that Jewish stories center the awkwardness, the grief, the powerlessness of immigration. What The Brutalist may not have intended was to come at a time as contentious as 2025 has been for immigrants—Jewish or not. Brody began his Oscar acceptance speech by thanking those who have treated him with respect and appreciation. When I first heard those words, they were meaningless; if you have not watched the film (or read this far), they may also be meaningless to you. Truthfully, I can’t say for certain they were not, just as I can’t say for certain that Brody’s pause before addressing antisemitism was heavy only with our own needs and expectations of a Jewish actor winning an award for a Jewish role. I believe they weren’t meaningless, and I invite you to live in them.

Storytelling is not just powerful. It is essential. It is how we communicate, argue, and ask for empathy. The Brutalist is a film that does just that—for victims, for survivors, for people with disabilities, for the Black community, for Jews, and yes, for immigrants.