Edwin Heathcote at the Financial Times sees undoubted epic brilliance, but a clichéd portrayal of the architect as tortured, solitary, male genius — “a battle to defend the purity and perfection of his vision and a refusal to compromise.” Architecture isn’t like that, says Heathcote. “It is about accommodating people; users and clients, neighbours and authorities.” Fair enough if the architect cliché included being actually tortured — Tóth was in Buchenwald — and being isolated by experiences few could comprehend.

Philip Kennicott at The Washington Post also overlooks Tóth’s situation, finding a “caricature of architects as megalomaniacs, fanatic in their devotion to utopian visions and brutal in their indifference to the everyday humanity of those who love, serve and employ them”. He finds a film committed to resuscitating manifestos of modernism. The Brutalist “goes all in on the idea that we still desperately need the old dyad of genius and modernist progress, that great minds, great thoughts, great works of human creativity can still transform us spiritually and materially.”

The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright says architects take issue with a film that claims to be fictional but is clearly based on Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer, known for curved, tubular steel furniture “of a kind practically identical to Tóth’s”.

Breuer was also commissioned to design a brutalist church on a hill, for Benedictine monks, rather than a millionaire psychopath industrialist. The epic project went through similar agonies: Tóth regularly erupts with “prima-donna fits of screaming when he doesn’t get his way”.

The compromises resolved in the decadelong development of Breuer’s church building, argues Wainwright, would have made for a much more interesting story than the film’s two-dimensional portrayal of the tempestuous architect-client relationship. Truth is better than fiction.

Yet, Tóth’s outburst delivers one of the best lines ever about the realities of making good architecture. “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid — but, most importantly, ugly — is your fault,” he rages at an imposed project manager. You also wouldn’t have the spectacular Carrara marble quarry scene where architect and client select materials. This is followed by the client sexually assaulting the architect, all the while insulting his race and status. It’s an absurdly literal metaphor for the client/architect relationship and a reminder that anti-semitism is never far away.

“There’s no brutalist architecture in The Brutalist,” complains Thomas de Monchaux at Tablet Magazine. He notes the absence of the work of three towering figures: ex-Bauhaus wartime emigrés Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Jewish Lithuanian immigrant, Louis Kahn. That absence matters a lot to some architects, though surely the resonances of the title go well beyond architectural style.

Tóth’s most ambitious commission, for his unhinged wealthy client Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), is a huge community centre on a hilltop in Pennsylvania, featuring an auditorium, a gym and a chapel. What gets some architects riled is Tóth’s inclusion of small rooms infused with painful memories, their proportions taken from Buchenwald concentration camp. “This then is a ‘serious’, existential building, one concerned with life and death, darkness and light, suffering and redemption,” says Heathcote. “Fine, perhaps, for a memorial or a crematorium chapel, less so, perhaps, for a community space, gym and library.”

It’s worth remembering here that the concentration camps and crematoria were designed by architects, including Bauhaus graduate Fritz Ertl, responsible for the brutal grid of horse-stable barracks that comprised Auschwitz-Birkenau. Organised in repeating units of 12 sheds, it’s possible to see in the design a chilling echo of early modernist ideas about minimum habitation promoted by Neues Bauen (New Building) architects under the Weimar Republic. Those architects promoted large-scale production of affordable modern housing for urban populations. At Birkenau, by compressing the idea of existenzminimum (subsistence dwelling) beyond imaginable limits, the Nazi architects unbelievably crammed 744 people into each of the 174 sheds housing a routinely culled and replenished slave labour force of 125,000.

Yet architects surely bring their own experiences of space and its uses to their designs, especially experiences with unimaginable effects on their lives. For Tóth to repurpose the proportions of his prison doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Architect Daniel Libeskind in Religion Unplugged asks what the title The Brutalist really signifies. “Is it that the brutal history of the 20th century and its totalitarian regimes and concentration camps have given birth to forms that symbolize the resistance to authority? Is ‘brutality’ reason, or is it an acknowledgment that after the Holocaust (and Hiroshima) architecture will never be the same?”