Brick Review: Psychological Thriller Stumbles Under the Weight of Its Ambitions

Brick Review: In this Netflix sci-fi film, a young couple find themselves trapped in their apartment building one fine morning when a mysterious brick wall pops up out of the blue. Confused and desperate, they team up with their neighbours to find a solution and get out alive.

Brick film has a runtime of 99 minutes.

Brick Review

In Philip Koch’s Netflix film Brick, a young couple, Tim and Olivia, find themselves trapped in their own grief after suffering a personal loss. The film is very clearly a metaphor for it, with a brick wall suddenly appearing around their home to trap them in. It brings forth a claustrophobic survival puzzle that unfolds into something generic and, unfortunately, leaves you dissatisfied in the end.

The hook of the film is surprisingly fun, and you start off with high hopes thinking something wacky is coming to get you. There’s tension and the exploration of grief that always makes films like this deliciously twisted and heavy, and leaves you with a lot of thoughts. However, this film somehow doesn’t live up to the potential of its promising concept and leaves you confused about the what and the why in the end.

As mentioned previously, the film is a metaphor for emotional isolation and is mostly an exploration of that concept. The situation forces them to confront their inner demons and how everything has turned out for them individually and as a couple. That’s great and all, but the characters themselves feel flat and one-dimensional, unable to convey the heavy concept described on paper. The film brings forth the claustrophobia of being trapped and the emotional barricades we carry inside, but somehow it falters when it comes to the characters, who don’t make you believe in them and the demons that they are trying to get rid of.

Other than that, the film’s supporting characters are terribly one-dimensional as well, even frustratingly so. They are flat archetypes of people you expect to see in a film like this, and, at one point, left me oddly enraged! It’s clear that they are merely placeholders, and I found that to be frustratingly lazy. Other than that, I found Matthias Schweighöfer and Ruby O. Fee to be delightful in their performances. Despite the flat characters, they give it their all to bring their characters’ problems to the screen well and share a lovely chemistry to boot.

Writer-Director Koch is unable to make us truly resonate with the weighty concept of the film because its characters are too hollow to believe in. They are shallow representations of what people are, not people themselves. The stiff, expository dialogues are even more annoying and make this whole ordeal a lot more frustrating than it needed to be. In the end, I found myself questioning the point of it all, which is a tragedy in and of itself.

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That being said, not all is lost; other than the great performances by the lead, the film looks and feels eerie, with the cinematography and sound design making you feel like something truly shocking is taking place. Despite its flaws, the film makes you curious, although it does lose all of its goodwill with a boring and predictable ending.

Final Thoughts

Brick focuses more on wrangling heavy emotions rather than giving us a suspenseful and tense mystery. The wrangling is fine, it just doesn’t try to figure out what the end goal of the wrangling is supposed to be. The performances are fine, and the concept is novel, but the film drops the ball on creating real tension that sticks. This one’s a miss in my book.

Also Read: Brick Review: Psychological Thriller Stumbles Under the Weight of Its Ambitions