Central to the plot of the director Brady Corbet’s new drama, “The Brutalist,” is an enormous structure known as the Van Buren Institute. Situated in Pennsylvania, it is made of concrete. The negative space between the two towers that stretch high above it forms the symbol of a cross. When light pours into a chapel belowlucky block, the same emblem illuminates a marble altarpiece.

Viewers have asked Corbet and his co-writer and partner, Mona Fastvold, if they can visit the institute. The couple regrets to tell them they cannot.

The prime minister and the billionaire business leader have bonded over the years. They share concerns about artificial intelligence and declining birthrates in Western countries, which Mr. Musk has called an existential threat to civilization.

The death in New York appears to be the second linked to E.E.E. this year in the United States. The first involved a 41-year-old New Hampshire man who died in August. Human cases of the disease have also been reported this year in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“None of it is real,” Fastvold said during a recent interview.

“And what we did build we destroyed,” including an approximately nine-foot-long model, Corbet added. Given that the production cost only $10 million, they couldn’t afford the storage space to keep the memorabilia.

The institute is one of many tricks that “The Brutalist” pulls off in its run time of three-and-a-half hours, intermission included. Imagined by the production designer Judy Becker, working from details that Corbet and Fastvold put in the script, the edifice is crucial to understanding the psychology of the film’s hero, the Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody.

László, a Holocaust survivor who arrives in America at the start of the film, is commissioned to build the community center by his wealthy patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Van Buren sees it as a tribute to his late mother, and seeks approval from the small-town government that demands it have Christian iconography. László turns it into a personal project related to the suffering he and his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), endured. The ways in which he conceived it as a tribute to their love are only revealed in the film’s coda.

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