It’s become a fun pub trivia act to be able to rattle off the legion of beloved performers who got their start on the big screen by acting in horror movies. It’s less common, however, to learn about actors famous for their roles in horror films pivoting to directing and nabbing an Academy Award nomination for Best Director in the process. But that’s precisely what happened with Brady Corbet, the director behind one of the frontrunners for Best Picture (at the time of writing) and a film that /Film’s Chris Evangelista called “an overwhelming triumph” in his review, “The Brutalist.”
Corbet, for those not familiar, made his feature directorial debut in 2015 with “The Childhood of a Leader.” Loosely adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same name, the film centers on an American boy living in France with his authoritarian parents during the Treaty of Versailles and explores the impact this has on his life. His follow-up movie, “Vox Lux,” was a criminally underappreciated three-act musical drama starring Natalie Portman about a musician whose break into the industry came after she survived a mass shooting in her youth.
This is to say, the stories Corbet has chosen to helm are dissections of the ways our most formative experiences continue to impact our lives well into adulthood. He’s a director deeply invested in the psychological ramifications of adverse experiences, and “The Brutalist” is no different. But this is pretty par for the course when looking at Corbet’s previous career as an actor. He made his debut in Catherine Hardwicke’s “Thirteen,” playing the brother of Evan Rachel Wood’s Tracy Freeland, a character who watches as his younger sister engages in self-destructive behavior after turning 13. The following year, he appeared in “Thunderbirds,” the massive box office disaster that ended “Star Trek” actor Jonathan Frakes’ feature directing career, but he was also cast in Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin,” a devastating portrait of the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse as survivors enter their teen years.
But arguably Corbet’s most notorious role was in Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke’s 2007 remake of his own brutal, satirical psychological horror-thriller, “Funny Games.”
The horror of the American remake of Funny Games
Haneke’s original “Funny Games” was released in 1997 and centers on a family visiting their holiday home, only to encounter a pair of “polite” young men who manipulate their way into their house in order to terrorize and torture the family for seemingly no apparent reason. A decade later, Haneke crafted a shot-for-shot remake of his own film for English-speaking audiences, with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts taking over as the couple on vacation and Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet playing the young men, known as Paul and Peter.
Paul is the calm, perverted, calculating leader of the duo and clearly takes a much larger sense of enjoyment in tormenting and toying with his victims. He’s also a bully to Peter, often antagonizing him not only to keep him in his place, but also to spark aggressive outbursts. Peter is impulsive and violent yet consistently backs down to whatever Paul orders of him. Of the two, Peter is also the one who is unaware that they are in a movie, as only Paul breaks the fourth wall toward the end of the film.
Regardless, they’re both ruthless killers who despite their partnership and are cruel toward each other, with Paul constantly picking on Peter’s weight and Peter letting Paul chase down the couple’s son knowing full well Paul could get killed while doing so. We never learn how Paul and Peter came to find one another or why it is they are inflicting all this pain on the family, which makes their crimes even more horrific. There’s no logic (however dark) to their actions, only depravity and death. “Funny Games” is, in my opinion, the best American remake of an international horror film ever made, and it’s in large part due to the performances by Pitt and Corbet.
So, the next time you watch “The Brutalist,” remember that this brilliant work of cinema came from the same guy who once bashed Tim Roth’s knees in with a golf club.
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