A fictional story about the struggles of a Holocaust survivor in the US is favourite to win the best picture Oscar. Historians and experts, along with the film's star and director, discuss how accurate The Brutalist is.

When László Toth first sees New York's Statue of Liberty in the opening scene of Brady Corbet's film The Brutalist, it's upside down. It's 1947 and Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who has survived the Holocaust, has arrived to start a new life in the US. The statue only appears to be upside down because of Toth's awkward perspective; but the visual inversion of America's historic welcome point for immigrants is a warning that this film is no success story about "the American dream".

The Brutalist, nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actor (for Adrien Brody, who plays Toth) is, despite its historical setting, a fictitious story. Toth, who survived Buchenwald concentration camp, has been forcibly separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) during the war and hopes she can join him. In his pre-war career, he was a brilliant student of the Bauhaus in Germany, and an architect of modernist public buildings in Budapest. But Toth's hopes of building a new life in the so-called land of opportunity are illusory. After working as a labourer, he finds patronage with Pennsylvanian entrepreneur Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) who commissions him to build a grand monument, but it's made increasingly clear to Toth that he is a Jewish outsider in this rural white Protestant society. He is brutalised by the Van Buren family emotionally and, in one horrifying scene, physically. "We tolerate you," Van Buren's predatory and sneering son Harry (Joe Alwyn) tells the architect, leading Toth to despairingly conclude to his wife, "they do not want us here".

The concept of the American dream was first popularised by writer James Truslow Adams in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression. It's an ideal that, in the US, everyone has the freedom and opportunity to make a better life but Corbet, an American himself, takes a sledgehammer to that idea in his three-and-a-half-hour film. "The American myth is something that is not frequently undressed, especially in this 'coming to America' fable that we have seen rehashed again and again," Corbet tells the BBC. "So, I thought it was important, even in narrative terms, to propose a story that starts off in familiar territory, but that ends up in more unchartered places."

Toth's struggle to build something lasting and true to his vision in The Brutalist is a metaphor for all artists, including Corbet himself – he worked on developing the film for seven years with writer and partner Mona Fastvold and delivered an impassioned speech calling for directors to have creative control of their movies at this year's Golden Globes. But Corbet has said that, inspired by the Brutalist architectural movement of the 1950s, he also set out to deliver a metaphor on how the immigrant experience can parallel artistic struggle.

"The film is about how the artistic experience and immigrant experience march in lockstep, which is to say that, in general, if someone moves into a suburban town in America and they don't look like everybody else, because of the colour of their skin or because of their beliefs or traditions, everybody wants them to get… out," Corbet told the Hollywood Reporter. "With Brutalism in the 1950s, when people were erecting these monuments, many people wanted them torn down immediately… Brutalist architecture is representative of something that people do not understand and that they want torn down and ripped away."

This style of architecture, which originated in the UK in the 1950s and is famous for its concrete structures, rough textures and geometrical angles, informed Corbet and Fastvold's creation of Jewish immigrant László Toth, who pours all his pain from the Holocaust into trying to realise an immense monument in a new land that does not welcome him.

Corbet says that he believes that there's a link between post-war psychology and post-war architecture after 1945. "I did think, 'I think it's time for a film on Brutalism'," Corbet tells the BBC. "I read a lot on the subject, and there's an extraordinary book called Architecture and Uniform by the academic Jean-Louis Cohen that really examines the relationship between post-war psychology and post-war architecture, and the ways in which materials that were developed for life during wartime were eventually incorporated into many of these buildings in the 1950s."

Corbet has Jewish heritage through his mother, but when asked recently by The Jewish Chronicle if the film was a reflection on rising antisemitism, Corbet replied: "The movie is about generational trauma… the immigrant experience is a mostly universal one. I don't know anyone that hasn't been affected by it, or whose family hasn't been........

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