The locked-room mystery has been a staple of the thriller genre since time immemorial; there’s a perverse delight in throwing a small cast of characters in a box, locking the door, and watching them work together (or tear each other apart) trying to get out. It’s the backbone of the “Escape Room” movies, or the “Saw” franchise; Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi headscratcher “Cube” is maybe the platonic ideal of this type of flick. Netflix’s latest original film, the German-language techno-thriller “Brick,” clearly wants to chase that budget-conscious high, with a simple mystery and a misfit cast of characters to solve it. It’s frustrating, then, to see such high-concept potential, some decent production design, and a couple of game leads fall victim to a mystery that unfolds with thudding obviousness.
Our window into the world is tempestuous couple Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer of Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” and Schweighöfer’s own spinoff “Army of Thieves“) and Liv (Schweighöfer’s IRL partner, Ruby O. Fee); the pair have suffered years of grief at the loss of Liv’s pregancy some time ago, and Tim’s retreat into his solitary work making video games has pushed Liv to the point where she’s chosen to pack up stakes and leave. But when she swings open the door to walk out on him, the two find, rather than the hallway to their cramped apartment, a tesselated matte-black wall made of irregular bricks. It seems indestructible, and even slightly dangerously magnetic: put too many metal objects near the wall, and they’ll shoot back out at you. In fact, the whole building seems covered in this sci-fi substance, meaning (especially since they have no running water or cell signal) that they’ll die of starvation in just a few days. Luckily, they’ve got some power tools they can use to punch their way into the neighboring apartments and the floors below. Together with neighbors they’ve never met or barely know, they’ll have to find their way out of the building before time runs out for all of them.
It’s a juicy conceit for a thriller, and it hums nicely along when Tim, Liv, and their shaky alliance of neighbors get to work on finding a way out and testing the limits and parameters of the brick walls. Writer-director Philip Koch livens up these sequences with roving and tilting cameras, spinning slowly down the array of holes they make in each floor, and the production design offers arguably more insight into the living conditions and character of its supporting cast than the script or performances. Like “Cube” before it, the best way to solve their predicament is maps and maths, and the added wrinkle of some characters knowing more about what traps them than they might let on offers some potential for intrigue.
Unfortunately, “Brick”‘s characters aren’t multifaceted or interesting enough to carry the bits in this kind of movie where the pressure of life or death brings out everyone’s true nature. Much of the film’s emotional core revolves around Tim and Liv’s reconciliation in the face of a life-or-death situation (a moment where, naturally, Tim gets to show up for Liv in ways he didn’t before), but it plays out with such obviousness and through lengthy dialogue exchanges that it’s hard to care. Same goes for the others in the group: whacked-out druggie Marvin (Frederick Lau) and his more level-headed girlfriend Ana (Salber Lee Williams), the classic grandpa-granddaughter combo (Axel Werner and Sira-Anna Faal), who primarily exist to offer even more vulnerable marks for our group to protect, and wild-eyed cop conspiracist Yuri (Murathan Muslu), whose glower and bulked-up physique leaves little question as to who will become the true threat in the film’s final act. Yuri also introduces the idea that the brick wall is good, actually, and it’s protecting them from something worse outside; the script has him trot out phrases like “deep state” and “UFOs” with all the obviousness of a screenwriter clumsily trying to capture the paranoia of the times.
“Brick,” to its mild credit, plays out the beats you’d expect in a thriller like this, from the interpersonal conflicts leading to bloodshed to the slow dispensing of clues that eventually circle right back around to the beginning. In those respects, Koch plays the hits well enough. But it’s hard not to be frustrated by the arch characters, the flat Netflix presentation of it all, the script that lumbers in translation to English (the German language performances are well and good, but Heaven help you if you attempt the English dub; in either case, the dialogue is clunky and utilitarian). What’s more, for its promise of B-movie thrills (and even one or two sci-fi vivisections), the violence feels relatively bloodless, going for TV-ready suspense rather than the nastiness a premise like this needs. It wants to be Ben Wheatley’s “High Rise” so bad, but it settles for a bit of “Home Alone.”
Every so often, Koch will cut to a fly buzzing around in the building, or trapped in a glass—that’s about as subtle as you’re going to get here. And like flies, “Brick” buzzes around your senses, grabbing for your attention, but has a very short shelf life.
