I don’t really care what this does or does not take from the book, because the point of an adaptation should be to have a take on the source material, not to be faithful to it. But this has no take whatsoever: it’s boring, repetitive, and surprisingly anodyne for a film that thinks it’s about sadomasochism, both of the emotional and sexual varieties. (And that wasn’t even subtext in the book, anyway, so it’s not like Fennell can get credit…

Just how monumental is this, really? Yes, it is shot on an unusually wide format, with a healthy dose of wide shots, and yes, it is about a man with towering ideas that result in towering buildings. But it felt small to me, at times even puny, as though Toth’s story were being slowly crushed beneath the weight of everything else around it. That, I think, is the point: Corbet has made a film of contrasts, ironies, and paradoxes, a…