His initial films were accomplished, often brilliant, but “The Brutalist” represents a dramatic step forward.

Critics hailed the movie as a masterpiece when it debuted at the Venice Film Festival; some compared its dark rumination on capitalism to that of “There Will Be Blood.” A24 bought the film and is planning a major Oscar push. Even if it doesn’t become an awards season darling, “The Brutalist” is indisputably one of the most audacious American independent films of this or any decade, boasting a run time of three and a half hours while telling a story that starts with American power at its postwar zenith and ends in the Reagan era. It was also shot in VistaVision, a large-format process popular in the 1950s, so it could be projected in 70mm like the screen epics of yesteryear. Oh, and it was all made for roughly $10 million — less than a tenth of what a major studio film costs.

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“We cut every corner we could to make sure that every single cent was on screen,” Corbet says. “It was a Herculean effort, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because it was just years and years of essentially working for free.”

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Despite the challenges, Corbet didn’t dream of making “The Brutalist” on a big budget. “I never thought, ‘I wish I had $30 million more,’” he says. “There’s a lot of strings that come with that kind of money. It invites lots of opinions. You have all these executives who don’t trust the director and bury them in notes. What you get is something antiseptic that lacks a signature. It’s the difference between a bowl from Crate & Barrel and a wabisabi ceramic.”

Like the style of architecture referenced in its title, “The Brutalist” may be polarizing, but it is unmistakably the movie Corbet set out to make.