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Cast: Joseph Gordon Levitt (Brendan Frye), Nora Zehetner (Laura), Lukas Haas (the Pin), Noah Fleiss (Tug), Matt O’ Leary (Brain), Emilie de Ravin (Emily Kostich)
Written and Directed by: Rian Johnson
Release date: April 2006

It has a cynical world-weary guy taking on the role of a detective for the sake of his ladylove. There is a creepy antagonist who might or might not be the villain in the plot. Also, there’s a femme fatale, a beautiful seductress who offers to assist the hero in his quest for the truth…for her own mysterious motives. There is plenty of crime and blood… murder, lies, betrayal, double-crossing … nothing is what it appears to be on the surface. Brick is the archetype of classic hard-boiled noir fiction, which could be straight from the pages of any Dashiell Hammett paperback.

And now comes the kickass part…the protagonists are all students of a California high school in the present day.

Brick is not a spoof as might be indicated by the anachronistic setting. It is a movie, which takes its story and characters with the utmost seriousness. The director creates a brooding, fatalistic world for these people, who are barely out of their teens, to live and breathe in.

Brendan Frye is an outsider in school. He eats his lunch on a lonely stretch of road outside the school walls. He looks a nerdy kind of guy, with his spectacles and his lean frame. But he can hold his own in a street brawl. He is smart and he sees through most of the sham around him. He can’t help but judge others, which was one of the factors that helped him push away his girlfriend Emily. He himself is not above striking deals with the vice-principal to save his own skin by handing over more serious offenders on a platter.

As the movie begins, we see Brendan in front of a dark tunnel, crouching beside a dead girl, his ex-girlfriend Emily. We gradually learn that she had called him up a couple of days earlier. She was distraught and frantic on the phone. But the conversation was cut short. With the assistance of a schoolmate, referred to only as the ‘Brain’, he locates the dope head punk Emily is residing with at the moment and sets up a meeting with her. She assures him that everything is fine. But something appears amiss to Brendan. He steals her diary and finds an encoded message, probably setting up a rendezvous. That very night, she turns up dead.

Brian goes deeper and deeper into the shadowy underground of high-school drug dealing in his determined efforts to find out what happened to Emily. On the way, he happens to revisit an old ‘friend’ Kara. She is playing her own little game in addition to passing her time with the freshmen wrapped around her little finger. . Then there’s Laura, who is connected to the school jock, Brad as well as the elusive kingpin of the drug trade or ‘Pin’ for short. The Pin is crippled and he reads Tolkien. He lives in his mother’s house and operates out of the basement. He himself is sufficiently menacing and he has a bulldozer of a guy(known as tug) as his ‘muscle’ or enforcer. As layers are peeled off and Brendan inches closer to the sequence of events leading to Emily’s grisly death, things keep getting murkier.

It won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance for Originality of Vision. This movie does have real guts. It breaks conventions and bends the genre, transforming clichés into the epitome of cool. The young cast effortlessly slips into their roles, smoothly mouthing the ironic tongue-in-cheek dialogue. It lends credibility to the make believe world of unspeakable shady deeds. Joseph Gordon-Levitt shows once again why he’s widely considered one of the most exciting young talents. He infuses Brendan with a quiet simmering intensity and a shrewd willfulness

The audacious experiment succeeds on both levels…as homage to the private-eye noir of yore and as deliciously intricate crime fiction.