WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Tim and Olivia are a couple whose relationship is strained. One night, Olivia decides to leave, but discovers their apartment is sealed off by a strange, impenetrable black brick wall. The rest of the building is also walled in, trapping all the residents

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Have you ever woken up and found your front door completely blocked? That’s exactly what happens to Tim and Liv in the German Netflix movie “Brick.” This couple already has enough problems without adding mysterious metal walls to their lives. Tim works as a game developer and spends way too much time staring at his computer screen. He’s the kind of guy who gets frustrated when his video calls freeze up, and he can’t seem to focus on anything else. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Liv wants to fix their broken relationship. She bought a cute pink van and dreams about driving to Paris together, leaving all their troubles behind. But Tim keeps making excuses about work and says they’ll travel “later.” We all know that later never comes. The couple went through something really tough a few years ago when Liv lost their baby. This tragedy split them apart emotionally, and they never learned how to talk about their feelings properly. Tim throws himself into work while Liv tries to move forward by making big, dramatic changes. One morning, Liv decides she’s had enough and plans to leave Tim for good. But when she opens the front door, she finds a solid black wall made of weird-shaped metal bricks. The same strange wall covers every window in their apartment. The water stops working, the internet goes down, and they can’t make phone calls. When Liv tries to drill through the wall, she can’t even make a scratch. The trapped couple breaks through their apartment wall and finds their neighbors dealing with the same problem. They meet Marvin and Ana, a young couple who just wanted to enjoy their vacation rental. There’s also an elderly man named Oswalt who carries around an oxygen tank and his granddaughter, Lea. The group also includes Yuri, a suspicious guy who believes conspiracy theories and thinks the wall might actually be protecting them from something worse. As they explore the building, they discover some disturbing things. One neighbor died trying to figure out how to break through the wall, and their landlord was found dead with his hands cut off. The group realizes they can move between apartments by smashing through walls and floors, so they start working together to find a way out. The movie wants to be both a puzzle-solving thriller and a deep story about relationships, but it struggles to do either one well. The premise sounds really interesting, like something you’d see in a classic science fiction TV show. Being trapped in a building with no way to communicate with the outside world is definitely scary. However, the movie never builds enough tension or makes us care deeply about what happens to these characters. The biggest problem is that we don’t feel emotionally connected to Tim and Liv’s relationship. Yes, they went through a terrible loss, but the movie only shows us a few flashback scenes of their trauma. We’re supposed to care about whether they’ll work things out, but their conversations feel forced and unnatural. The other characters in the building are pretty basic, too. Each person fits into a simple category like “the wise old man” or “the comic relief,” and they don’t feel like real people with complex personalities. The movie looks pretty good visually. The director does a decent job of moving the camera through holes in walls and floors, making the cramped apartment setting feel dynamic. The production design really makes great use of its limited location, making for a claustrophobic space that is fitting with the story. The English dubbing is absolutely awful. The lines do not sync with the mouth movements of the actors, and every line sounded flat or oddly happy. It made it hard to take the dramatic moments seriously. If you decide to watch this movie, definitely choose the original German audio with subtitles instead. The story follows a predictable pattern where characters get picked off one by one, but these deaths don’t feel shocking or meaningful. The movie spends too much time trying to explain why the walls appeared instead of focusing on the immediate survival situation. One should think that the characters worry more about basic supplies including food and water as the story begins, but these concerns barely come up. The ending shows some connection to the mystery of what actually created the walls, but does not leave you feeling satisfied or make the journey worthwhile. The film tries to toy with concepts of isolation and the human condition, but it never fully invests in those themes enough to make an impact. “Brick” ultimately feels like it could have been an episode of an anthology series – there isn’t much story here for a feature! The premise lends itself to possibly following through for 30 minutes, but trying to make the premise last for a full feature length makes its limitations obvious. The film doesn’t really know if it wants to be a relationship drama, a survival thriller, or a science fiction confined mystery, and winds up mediocre at all three at once. If you are looking for a trapped in a building movie, there are far better options available. Movies like “Cube” or “The Platform” take a similar concept and have more creativity or better characters than this. So while “Brick” was not entirely unwatchable, it was certainly uneventful. This film could have explored some really interesting ideas about the themes of grief, communication, and surviving under pressure, but instead, it opts for generic thriller plot points and shallow relationship drama. The actors are doing the best they can with what is given to them, but since there are many risks taken in the narrative, the script doesn’t give them much to do. It is possible people will enjoy “Brick” if they enjoy puzzle-box mysteries and do not mind some slow pacing, but most people will probably find it frustrating. The film sets up an interesting situation and it does nothing clever or unexpected with the event. The film, unfortunately, makes you think about how much better it could have been had it been tighter in terms of the script and its vision.

OUR RATING – A DROWNING BRICK 3