Brick (2025)

Two years after a miscarriage, Tim and Olivia are going through a crisis in their relationship. Tim suppresses the tragedy and does not talk about it with Olivia, leaving her feeling alone with her loss. Hoping to make a fresh start in their relationship, Olivia has quit her job and bought an old VW van so they can spontaneously take a trip to Paris. But Tim, who works as a game developer, is about to release a new computer game and does not want to take time off. Instead, they go out to dinner. On the street, they run into their landlord, who is having the building renovated. Meanwhile, they see a huge plume of smoke over the city, caused by a fire in the Port of Hamburg. When Tim and Olivia wake up the next morning, she ends their relationship. But she cannot leave their shared apartment on the second floor because their apartment building is surrounded by a mysterious black wall. All their attempts to break through into the stairwell with a demolition hammer fail. When the two hear loud, panicked voices from the neighboring apartment, they discover that they can break through the interior walls separating the units. Next door, they meet Ana and Marvin, a couple who have rented the apartment on Airbnb for a few days. Tim finds a sledgehammer in the neighboring apartment. Olivia, an architect, knows that there is a bunker in the basement of their building, and that there is a good chance they can escape through a subway tunnel from there. They use the sledgehammer to break through the ceiling into the floor below. After lowering themselves into the apartment beneath them, they are confronted on the first floor by Oswalt, a retiree, who holds them at gunpoint. His granddaughter Lea eventually manages to convince him that the four have not come to plunder his food supplies, but offer a real chance of getting out of the building. After discovering in the debris from the hole in the ceiling that their smoke detectors are fitted with surveillance cameras, they suspect the landlord of staging some kind of Squid Game with his tenants. To confront him, they break through the wall into the neighboring apartment. They find the landlord, Friedmann, there too, but he is dead and his hands have been severed. In his apartment, they find a hidden room where they can watch footage from cameras concealed in the apartments on monitors. Oswalt confirms Olivia’s suspicion that there is a bunker in the basement, so the group continues downward through the ceiling into the ground floor. In the ground-floor apartment, they are greeted by Yuri, who is visiting. His host, Anton, who had a pacemaker because of a heart condition, has died from the effects of the powerful magnetic field generated by the wall. Yuri tries to convince the group not to attempt to open the wall or go around it through the basement, explaining that it is a new kind of military defense system based on nanotechnology, which Anton had been researching. Worse still, opening the wall would allow toxic gas from outside to enter the building, killing them all. But Yuri’s words have no effect, and Tim smashes through the last ceiling into the basement. Two meters below street level, they open the bunker’s heavy gates, only to discover that the black wall also surrounds the building at this depth. Furious and disappointed, Marvin grabs the pistol Oswalt carries in his waistband to protect his granddaughter and fires several shots at the wall. The magnetic field slows the bullets and sends them flying back. The young people manage to get out of the way in time, but Oswalt is fatally shot in the chest. In the ground-floor apartment, the group discusses what to do next. They discover that death is what they all have in common. Marvin killed Oswalt, albeit accidentally, causing Lea to lose her grandfather. Ana admits that as a child she was clinically dead for a few minutes. Yuri killed someone in the line of duty as a police officer, and Tim and Olivia lost their child in a miscarriage. Because of this shared experience, they decide to keep working together to find a solution, and discover some notes that may contain the code for deactivating the wall. On her own, Lea realizes that Anton has marks on his neck from being strangled and was apparently killed by Yuri. She does not notice Yuri behind her, and he kills her too. Upstairs, the others also discover from footage recorded by the disguised surveillance cameras that Yuri strangled Anton after Anton managed to deactivate the wall using a light code transmitted by his phone. They return to the ground floor and have to watch as Yuri burns Anton’s notes. They then overpower him and tape him to a chair. Using Anton’s phone, they manage to turn the wall into a liquid state. Ana gets caught in it and is pulled deeper inside. Marvin, Olivia, and Tim try to pull her back, but fail. When the wall returns to a solid state, Ana is severed at the waist, and only her lifeless torso falls back into the apartment. Unable to bear his loss, Marvin shoots Yuri, who is bound and laughing. Yuri appears to be hit and dies, after which Marvin turns the gun on himself. Olivia and Tim realize they used the wrong sequence of light signals. They find the correct sequence in the video footage and manage to open the wall. After a fight with Yuri, who is still alive and has managed to free himself, the two escape the building via the ramp from the underground parking garage and drive away in their VW van. Yuri will do anything to prevent the wall from disappearing, believing it is what keeps him safe. In the final shot, it becomes clear that the entire city has been affected by the malfunction of the secret security system, which was triggered by the fire in the port area.