Stream It Or Skip It?

Netflix is likely hoping German flick Brick is its next The Platform – a strange pseudo-philosophical thriller that rides its Sartre-like thought experiment into streaming-hitsville. Writer-director Philip Koch (Netflix series Tribes of Europa) casts real-life life partners Matthias Schweighofer and Ruby O. Fee (both from Army of Thieves) as a couple on the rocks who find themselves trapped in their apartment building after it’s surrounded by a high concept. Namely, a crazy high-tech brick wall that’s either keeping them in or keeping something else out – now let’s see how tight a grip that mystery has on us.

BRICK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open on Tim (Schweighofer) as he stresses out over work shit. He’s a game developer and his zoom call is laggy and his frustration is intercut with overwrought flashbacks to traumatic events, i.e., his wife Liv’s (Fee) brutal miscarriage. That happened a couple years ago. He traps a fly under a glass and tries to liberate it out a window and fails, which is either symbolic foreshadowing, or indicative that he wouldn’t hurt a fly, maybe both. Liv pries him away from his computer long enough to take him outside and walk him past a few important plot things-slash-probable red herrings – a fire at a nearby industrial plant, their landlord apologizing for the long-in-the-works construction on their apartment building – to a cute pink van. She wants to up and leave right now. Go to Paris. Forget about the troubles of their past and current lives. Start over. It’s a well-intentioned but not entirely reasonable request, to which Tim replies in the negative, saying he can’t just up and quit his job (note, he absolutely can) and that they’ll vamoose outta town later. 

But later never comes, and Liv knows that all too well. She’s unhappy now, and that’s why, when Tim wakes up the next morning, she’s dressed and ready to leave. For good. This is what happens to people who don’t process their emotions, you know. She opens the door to find a black metallic wall built with odd-shaped bricks. The wall covers all the windows, too. The water doesn’t work and neither does the wifi. Liv grabs a drill and goes to town but gets nowhere. Not even a scratch. This is far from ideal. Silver lining, though: This situation might be exactly what an emotionally estranged couple needs – a project to work on together! 

Liv and Tim bust through the wall to the neighboring apartment and find Marvin (Frederick Lau) and Ana (Salber Lee Williams) freaking out, ripe and ready to do something desperate: leave a scathing Airbnb review. Ana says something about TikTok being full of UFO videos yesterday before they find a sledgehammer and start smashing through the floorboards. Liv is an architect, see, and she knows that the building was built in 1897 and is connected to underground tunnels leading to a bomb shelter. They gather some more friends (OR ARE THEY) as they make their way down: an old man (Axel Werner) with a pistol and an oxygen tank (always a fun combo) and his granddaughter (Sira-Anna Faal), as well as Yuri (Murathan Muslu), who’s full of conspiracy theories about what the brick wall is all about, and has the untrustworthy brow of a villain. Yuri’s friend’s body lies prone in bed – the poor guy tried to figure out how to penetrate the mystery brick and his pacemaker gave out (OR DID IT). The Scooby Gang also makes its way into the weirdo landlord’s apartment, only to find him dead in a pool of blood, his hands cut off and missing. The plot thicks!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Brick – not to be confused with Rian Johnson’s 2005 breakthrough of the same title – like The Platform before it, really wants to be an existential puzzle movie like Cube, with some stuff from the Escape Room movies mixed in.

Performance Worth Watching: Schweighofer’s has the compelling screen presence of a character actor – see: Oppenheimer, Army of the Dead – but it’s hard for him to transcend the limitations of Brick’s big concept and underwritten characters.

Memorable Dialogue: Liv: “This isn’t one of your stupid video games, Tim!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Hell is other people, as usual. Mostly. Sort of. I dunno. Brick isn’t sure what it wants to say, or if it has anything to say at all. It does very much make a smack-on-the-nose reference to Sartre’s No Exit, so it obviously yearns to be a thought experiment at the same time it’s a puzzle-box thriller. But it’s not particularly good at either, and ends up being a portrayal of flaccid gamesmanship among paper-thin characters. And even that implies a clarity of intent the film lacks. So I guess the movie’s all about establishing a concept and working through it in order to reach the highly shrugworthy conclusion in less than 100 minutes. As the characters smash through floors and subfloors in an attempt to escape, it becomes an ironic metaphor for the film’s marked lack of subtext.

Brick shows some potential in its production design, making the most of its handful of interior locations, Koch’s camera moving dextrously through holes in walls and floors, his visual approach showing a dynamic the screenplay lacks. The story falls back on a wheezy horror-movie template where characters are vague outlines of humans who could fall on either side of the protag/antag dividing line. These are hyperbolic people doing hyperbolic things, which doesn’t automatically imply that these are interesting people doing interesting things. In fact, they’re dullards functioning as sloppy archetypes (the wise old man, the comic relief, etc.), marching through the plot so the premise can find a way to knock them off one by one – with the kind of rote kills that’ll put horrormongers to sleep. There’s also an implicit insistence that we care about Liv and Tim’s troubled relationship, but a couple of hysterical flashbacks don’t cut it. The concept is a mysteriously impenetrable brick wall, and it stands between us and the characters.

Our Call: Bricked up. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.