Brick

Directed by Rian Johnson in his debut film, Brick (2005) is quite a remarkable experience. It takes the classic noir narrative of crime, but places it on a setting where it really shouldn't work, high school.

In terms of the narrative the film has the classic anti-hero, a detective down on his luck, lonely, alienated, tormented by a woman, desperately trying to find answers and willing to break the law to do it. Another main character is the ever-present in film noir, Femme Fatale, a mysterious and seductive woman who tests our hero's resolve. All the characters of larger than life and uses stereotypes commonly found in the hardboiled novels.

The film is most noticeable for its use of dialog. It takes its dialog style from the old hardboiled detective novels that inspired many of the early 1940's film noirs. It's very odd hearing teenagers talking in this style and the narrative seems like it just shouldn't work at high school but by combining all the different parts that shouldn't work they help complement each other. In other words, while it may seem odd that such young characters have such skewed views of morality, the fact they are in the middle of this detective drama and talking in such a way helps make it more believable and vice-versa.

Visually the films hints at the famous noir style particularly with the opening shot. A dead body is lying in a little stream running out of a menacing dark tunnel. The film also hits at the use of canted camera angles once when our hero Brendan is hit on the head in the tunnel and we see a canted angle shot of a dark shadow running away and whenever our hero it particularly in pain or disorientated, we the audience too become disorientated with the odd angled shots.

A fasinating modern day take on the old hardboiled novels and film noir style Brick is really worth the watch.