The locked-room mystery has long been a cornerstone of the thriller genre. Its appeal lies in its claustrophobic simplicity—trap a group of disparate characters inside a confined space, bar the exits, and sit back as paranoia, desperation, and suspicion peel away the layers of human nature. It’s a cinematic pressure cooker, as seen in franchise fare like Escape Room and the Saw films, or high-concept indies like Vincenzo Natali’s mind-bending Cube. Netflix’s new German-language original Brick clearly wants to slide into that same sandbox—offering a compact cast, a contained setting, and an existential puzzle to be solved under duress. But instead of hitting the genre sweet spot, Brick ends up feeling more like a flat echo of better films, weighed down by clunky dialogue, underwritten characters, and thriller tropes that feel reassembled from a dozen other stories.
Directed and co-written by Philip Koch, Brick opens with a set-up that teases enormous potential. The film introduces us to Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer, familiar to many from Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead and his own spin-off Army of Thieves) and Liv (Ruby O. Fee, also Schweighöfer’s real-life partner). Their relationship is hanging by a thread. Years earlier, they suffered a traumatic loss—the death of their unborn child—and Tim, consumed by grief and guilt, has withdrawn into the isolating world of game development. Liv, emotionally marooned, has finally had enough. As she prepares to walk out of their shared apartment and his life, something inexplicable happens.
She opens the door expecting a hallway. Instead, there’s a matte-black wall—a wall that looks like it belongs in a digital nightmare rather than a Berlin apartment building. The surface is constructed of tessellated bricks, irregularly shaped and somehow magnetic. Metal objects hurled toward the wall ricochet back with deadly force. Cell service is cut, the water supply is gone, and no amount of pounding or screaming breaches the structure. It soon becomes clear that the wall has enveloped not just their apartment, but the entire building. They’re trapped.
So begins Brick, with its sci-fi-tinged, Kafkaesque premise. Tim and Liv, now forced to put their break-up on hold, must confront this new existential prison. Armed with a few power tools and limited rations, they begin to breach the walls to adjoining units, discovering a handful of other tenants similarly imprisoned—and just as bewildered. A tentative alliance forms. Each resident brings their own baggage, secrets, and temperaments into the fray. The race against time—and starvation—begins.
The film hums with promise in these early stages. There’s something deliciously eerie about the simplicity of its concept: a familiar domestic space transformed into a trap without explanation or logic. Koch shoots these initial sequences with a kinetic energy. The camera slides and spins through the holes the characters carve into the building, creating a vertical maze reminiscent of Cube or even Snowpiercer, if compressed into a single apartment block. The production design, too, is worth applauding—the apartment interiors subtly reflect their inhabitants’ personalities, hinting at backstories the screenplay only half-fleshes out.
Like many of its genre predecessors, Brick leans on the idea that mathematics, mapping, and scientific reasoning might be the way out. The team scrambles to understand the pattern of the bricks, to chart a path through floors and walls, and to unearth any clue that might point to the origin or purpose of their imprisonment. At its best, this mechanical detective work feels satisfying—an intellectual exercise that also generates real physical stakes. There’s also an undercurrent of mistrust: do some of these people know more than they’re letting on?
Unfortunately, Brick is unable to sustain the tension. For every clever twist or visual flourish, there’s an awkward line reading or telegraphed narrative beat waiting to drag things down. The most significant problem is the cast of characters. What could have been a psychologically rich ensemble ends up feeling like a set of genre stereotypes shuffled into predictable roles.
Tim, for all his brooding anguish, doesn’t evolve so much as execute a scripted arc of redemption. Liv’s frustrations, though justified, are flattened into exposition-heavy confrontations. The couple’s journey toward reconciliation is meant to be the film’s emotional anchor, but it’s delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Their dialogue—especially in the English dub—becomes clunky and procedural, packed with lines that explain feelings rather than reveal them.
The supporting cast doesn’t fare much better. There’s Marvin (Frederick Lau), a chaotic drug addict whose volatility is counterbalanced by his more grounded girlfriend Ana (Salber Lee Williams). Then there’s the grandfather-granddaughter duo (Axel Werner and Sira-Anna Faal), who seem included solely to provide a sense of familial innocence and vulnerability to protect. Rounding out the group is Yuri (Murathan Muslu), a hulking, wild-eyed cop conspiracy theorist whose growing paranoia and latent aggression quickly telegraph his eventual descent into antagonist territory.
Yuri, in particular, is emblematic of the film’s inability to transcend cliché. At first, he offers a compelling wrinkle—suggesting that perhaps the brick isn’t a prison, but a shield, keeping them safe from some unknown threat lurking outside. It’s a clever reversal that hints at broader questions about surveillance, protection, and who benefits from control. But the script handles this philosophical ambiguity with all the finesse of a Facebook comment thread. Yuri starts spouting buzzwords like “deep state,” “UFOs,” and “government mind control,” as if Koch wanted to bottle all the internet’s collective tinfoil hat energy into a single character. The effect is more cartoonish than chilling.
To its credit, Brick follows the expected beats of its genre with competent, if uninspired, efficiency. There are betrayals, outbursts, bursts of violence, and the steady revelation of secrets. The group dynamic frays as resources dwindle and options narrow. Blood is shed. Tensions rise. Koch plays these familiar notes well enough, and viewers who enjoy the basic mechanics of a trapped-with-strangers thriller may find modest enjoyment in watching it all unfold.
But the film consistently undercuts itself. Its Netflix sheen—a kind of glossy, interchangeable visual style that feels both high-tech and lifeless—makes the whole thing feel processed and inert. Despite its genre leanings, Brick is surprisingly tame when it comes to gore or genuine horror. The violence is muted, sanitized. Rather than leaning into the grotesque potential of its premise (as Saw might), it hedges its bets, aiming for PG-13 tension that feels oddly antiseptic. Even when a character dies or is seriously injured, there’s little impact or resonance.
And then there’s the dialogue, which clunks and creaks whether you’re watching the German original or the English dub. In German, the performances from the cast are competent—sometimes even compelling—but they’re hamstrung by a script that rarely allows them to speak like real people. In English, the dub reduces everything to robotic literalism. There’s no poetry, no natural rhythm, no room for interpretation. The film becomes trapped in its own linguistic box.
Thematically, Brick gestures toward grand ideas—grief, forgiveness, community, the fragility of human connections under stress—but it never quite delivers on them. The wall itself is an obvious metaphor, not only for emotional isolation (particularly Tim’s) but also for social fragmentation and mistrust. Koch even throws in a few metaphorical shots of a fly buzzing inside the building, or trapped in a glass container. Subtle? Hardly. It’s the kind of visual motif that practically screams “Look! This is about entrapment and futility!”
Which is, ultimately, the fate of the film itself. For all its high-concept aspirations, Brick feels trapped in its own structure—a film about people stuck in a box that can’t quite figure out how to break out of the genre conventions it’s built around. It wants to be Cube meets High Rise, with a dash of Black Mirror. But it ends up feeling more like a Netflix algorithm’s idea of what an intelligent thriller should look like. Even the film’s conclusion—tying back to earlier clues and closing the loop in a way that’s supposed to be satisfying—feels perfunctory. We’re left not with awe or catharsis, but a quiet shrug.
Still, there are flashes of something better buried in the bricks. Koch has an eye for spatial storytelling, and the central conceit is strong enough to support a better movie. In a tighter, more daring film—perhaps one less beholden to international streaming appeal—Brick might have fully explored the psychological and philosophical terrain it hints at. As it stands, though, it’s more of a half-built metaphor, solid in structure but hollow in heart.
In the end, Brick buzzes and rattles, occasionally hitting a nerve, but more often simply skimming past your attention. Like the fly trapped in glass that it keeps cutting back to, the film is alive—but barely.
