Brick (2025)

Streaming Service: Netflix
Movie Name/Year: Brick (2025)
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Sci-Fi
Length:  1h 39min
Rating: TV-MA
Director: Philip Koch
Writer: Philip Koch
Actors: Matthias Schweighöfer, Ruby O. Fee, Frederick Lau, Salber Lee Williams, Murathan Muslu, Sira-Anna Faal, Axel Werner, Alexander Beyer, Josef Berousek, Daniele Rizzo, Nader Ben-Abdallah, Daniela Galbo, Markus Ransmayr

IMDb Blurb: A couple whose apartment building is suddenly surrounded by a mysterious brick wall must work with their neighbors to find a way out.

Cat’s Point of View:
My daughter and I selected Brick to watch out of a completely random impulse – just because it was new and interesting, based on its description. When we began to watch the trailer, I got a bit excited because I recognized Matthias Schweighöfer (Army of the Dead, Oppenheimer, Elio) was one of the leads.

Selina and I had really enjoyed the Zack Snyder (Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's Justice League) movies Army of the Dead (2021) and Army of Thieves (2021). Of course, Schweighöfer actually directed the Thieves movie while Snyder wrote and produced that one… but I digress. We knew then that we really enjoyed Schweighöfer’s performance as Ludwig Dieter.

The concept of some sort of mysterious wall appearing instantly around a whole building and its impervious nature in the face of power tools sparked my interest. The fact I recognized a couple people in the movie was really only a secondary factor. I was intrigued by their problem-solving process, and appreciated the multiple layers to the story.

As I began to pull together the movie information for this review article, I was a bit baffled as to why the aggregate review scores for Brick were so low. This film really wasn’t bad. It wasn’t the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, but it was solid – not to make a wall pun.

Once I read through a few of the summaries, I began to piece together why this particular production fell flat for some Netflix viewers. I think it might have been a slight case of “lost in translation.”

While I felt that the literal translation and dubbing of Brick was just fine, and everything meshed better than expected for a film that wasn’t shot in English, I decided to watch it again in its original German with the subtitles just to compare.

I see what some viewers were getting at.

Don’t get me wrong, the actors that dubbed Brick for English did a good job. There was just a little loss of emotional nuance in the difference between the actor’s performance in the original filmed scene and the one in the voice-over, recording after-the-fact. There was a slight exception, however. Matthias Schweighöfer was able to dub his own lines in English. He was the only actor from the German language original to do so. 

That being said, if you don’t mind the subtitles, I would recommend watching Brick in its original language. Either way, I found this shiny new Netflix original to check off most of the proverbial boxes for elements I appreciate in a sci-fi movie. There were real stakes, the solution wasn’t spoon-fed to the characters and they had to reason things out. There was even a good example of why it’s not generally a good idea to drink the conspiracy theory Kool-Aid.

Brick might just be one of the hidden gems of the summer.

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score – 35%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score – 27%
Metascore – 53%
Metacritic User Score – 4.2/10
IMDB Score – 5.4/10

Trust the Dice: Cat’s Rating –  3.5/5

Movie Trailer: