In the case of a high-concept science fiction thriller, an elevator pitch of a premise can carry the entire project a long way. “The residents of an apartment building awaken to find that the entire building has suddenly been encased in mysterious, indestructible metal bricks” is an easy mystery to sell, sounding for all intents and purposes like a classic Twilight Zone pitch, ripe for 90 minutes of survival suspense. You can imagine why the concept would appeal to Netflix, looking to replicate the likes of Escape Room or elements of their own (far superior) sci-fi thriller The Platform … or, to indulge in an older comparison, Vincenzo Natali’s Cube in particular. But sadly, even a perfectly workable premise needs engaging writing, directing and performances to bring it to life, and in this capacity, Netflix’s new feature Brick is as utterly inert as its title–likewise reused from Rian Johnson’s far more interesting high school neo-noir from 2005. And Matthias Schweighöfer is no Joseph Gordon-Levitt, despite the two being exactly the same age.
Schweighöfer is an actor I’ve been perplexed by in the past, particularly in Zack Snyder’s garishly styled and painfully contrived Army of the Dead, wherein his safecracker character was constantly referred to as “a kid,” despite the man being more than 40 years old. One gets the sense that the German leading man’s face retained natural, boyish youthfulness for so long that casting directors eventually just stopped paying attention to the guy’s year of birth, but it’s safe to say that time does indeed come for us all: In Brick, as protagonist Tim, his age is exceedingly indeterminate, his face looking both weathered and leathery and artificially plastic all at once. It’s an apt metaphor for this confused film’s inability to take a fairly conventional premise and imbue it with anything the least bit naturalistic. Brick is 100% artifice, never allowing its audience a single moment of immersion thanks to its constant uncanniness and offputting qualities.
There’s no getting around the most prominent of those immediate problems: This a German production, but for its Netflix release it has been given an English dub that is distractingly, egregiously terrible, even when the dub was seemingly recorded by the same actor, as in the case of Schweighöfer. Each and every vocal delivery seems pitched incorrectly for the character or the moment; every line flipping a coin between monotone and inappropriately chipper. Not the smallest effort has been made to sync any of the dialogue with characters as they speak, leading to instances where the mouths continue flapping for a second or two before or after English dialogue has stopped. At times, it feels like the entire audio track has come unmoored and is going to simply float away. Try as you might, the awkwardness is impossible to ignore.
This unsurprisingly has the effect of robbing the performances of any kind of naturalism–how can we connect with the backstory of Tim and girlfriend Olivia (Ruby O. Fee, Schweighöfer’s real-life partner), as they process the grief of having lost a child, when the tenor of their confessional conversations takes on an overtone of comical absurdity? The English dialogue we hear is stilted and alien, sounding as if it was run through a free online translator from the original script: At one point, Olivia berates Tim, a workaholic game designer, by insisting that “This isn’t one of your crappy, silly videogames, Tim!” Crappy and silly, indeed. It all begs the question of why Brick couldn’t have been allowed to simply feature its original German audio, with subtitles. At least that would have aided its tone in matching the often strained faces on screen. As is, there’s a constant, yawning chasm of disconnect between the two.
This might have been less of a problem if Brick had been focused tightly around its “we’re trapped in this building and searching for an answer to the technological mystery” premise, but the film isn’t particularly interested in its own supposed genre leanings, and far more invested in the personal drama of Olivia and Tim’s dissolution or reconciliation. Even once they start tunneling through the walls and floors and meeting the other neighbors they’re trapped in the building with, the film hews close to their diametrically opposed reactions to the trauma they’ve shared together, rather than the mysterious, magnetized metal walls surrounding them. Where Olivia has thrown herself into grandiose, performative acts of healing, quitting her job and buying a van to attempt to leave all the pain behind and “start fresh” on a road trip with her partner, the withdrawn Tim threw himself into his work in the days, months, years after their tragedy. The couple is given an empathetic foundation, but it doesn’t really come into play in their actual fight for survival–remember, there’s this whole BRICKED building to deal with?–in any kind of substantive way. We’re left with tepid melodrama, waiting for the sci-fi survival story that is teased, but never really arrives in earnest.
Equally banal are the squad of quirky supporting characters who flesh out the ensemble, including druggie tourists Marvin (Frederick Lau, anxious comedic relief) and Ana (Salber Lee Williams), gun-toting senior Oswalt (Axel Werner), and his undefined granddaughter Lea (Sira-Anna Faal). That configuration leaves us light on potential antagonists and creepy antisocial dirtbags, so we must also add conspiratorial policeman Yuri (Murathan Muslu) to the mix, who for largely unsupported reasons has come to the conclusion that the walls aren’t meant to imprison the building’s inhabitants, but to protect them from some terrible fate outside. Ah, is that a little twist of 10 Cloverfield Lane in this formula as well? As it turns out, not really: Dan Trachtenberg’s films develop compelling, multifaceted relationships between characters trapped in this kind of predicament, where Philip Koch’s Brick is willing to settle for each occupant simply representing a specific opinion on how they might next try to escape.
In terms of what works here, it’s not exactly a robust collection of elements. The production design is at least decent–the titular wall of metallic, irregularly shaped bricks has a slick but imposing look to it, and care was taken to allow each apartment’s furnishings to extrapolate the taste and social status of each resident. There are a few engaging shots in which a moving camera swings us up and down multiple levels of the building through the holes that have been smashed through the floors, feeling like a roving marauder stalking the residents. But suffice to say, this is me hunting for silver linings of any kind. Narratively, Brick bogs down ever more listlessly just when it should be accelerating. It moves with such torpor that when it finally takes a turn for the grisly near its end, the inclusion of some more pulpy violence registers as out of place, given how it’s been preceded by so many scenes of the residents sitting around their apartments, arguing about trivialities. It’s easy to imagine how the entire film could have embraced a more brash, gaudy B-movie sensibility throughout to lean harder into the effective simplicity of its premise, but Brick’s desire to dither more on character work–while delivering dialogue that is profoundly incapable of selling those character beats–dooms it to a newly reserved spot on the streaming feature refuse heap.
All in all, Brick has been massively miscalculated in an attempt to make it more palatable for English-speaking audiences, although merely offering the same film in German would likely only have been a modest improvement. Like poor Fortunato, it should be allowed to rest in peace behind the newly constructed walls that surround it, forgotten by the world.
Director: Philip Koch
Writer: Philip Koch
Stars: Matthias Schweighöfer, Ruby O. Fee, Salber Lee Williams, Frederick Lau, Murathan Muslu, Axel Werner, Sira-Anna Faal
Release date: July 10, 2025 (Netflix)
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.
