Brick is a 2005 American neo-noir thriller and was written and directed by Rian Johnson.
The film draws heavily in plot, characterisation, and dialogue from hard-boiled classed.
The title refers to a block of heroin, compressed roughly to the size and shape of a brick.
Brick was distributed by Focus Features.
Main Characters
Why Brick is a Neo-Noir
Some settings in Brick are very typical of film noir and neo-noirs.
This is one setting that comes up a lot in the film because it's the place that Emily was murdered.
A dark tunnel is a setting that is used a lot in film noirs.
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This dark tunnel also means that you cannot see who's in the tunnel when Brendan finds Emily's body. This means that the identity of the person is hidden from the audience until near the end of the film, creating suspense and adding another clue that Brendan has to piece together.
Laura very much acts as the Femme Fatale in this movie.
This is the first time that Laura starts to try and get close to Brendan. She seductively puts her arm round his neck and tries to get closer to him.
When she walks away, she walks slowly, in a walk that would leave an impression in his mind. Her dress is red and skin tight, showing every curve she has. She is also wearing a lot of red.
In a lot of the scenes there is chiaroscuro lighting used. When Laura meets Tug there is one source of lighting from the street lamp. This hides the identity of the two and makes it seem more like they don't want anyone else to see what they are up to.
The sun is also a source of light in a lot of the scenes. It casts mysterious shadows of their own everywhere.
In the Halloween party scene, the candles are used as the source of light. It creates light and dark parts of the room and also makes it more seductive when Laura enters and tries to get closer to Brendan.
We first see Brendan and Kara in this scene through the mirror, like in a lot of film noirs, so instead of them seeing each other face to face, they are seeing each other through the mirror.
In film noirs, reflection is used to suggest that there is problems between the two characters.
Brendan smashes the mirror later on in the movie when he gets annoyed at Kara. The smash in the middle of the mirror hides to the audience the whole picture and what is happening. It often cuts off half of Brendan's face and body and it hides what Brendan does to make Kara scream, creating suspense, until the next shot when it looks like Kara was pushed out the way by Brendan.
This is the scene that Brendan pieces together and confronts Laura about the fact that he knows Laura set Emily up.
Laura tries to kiss Brendan, just like the Femme Fatale does in many film noirs, and get him to fall for her, but he resists because he knows that she has been a part of Emily's death. Brendan has known all along that he shouldn't trust her.
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There are a lot of scenes that show the time, as time is a big part of the film. The time has a big significance in this particular scene, because Emily will be at the tunnel at midnight, so the time is blurred out in the background like it would be in the back of his mind, and the piece of paper is clear in the foreground, because whats on the piece of paper is more important to him and he would be thinking about it more.
In this scene, Tug shoots Dode. The dark tunnel and the light shining through makes the four people like silhouettes, hiding their identities more.
When she shoots him, the gun shot echoes through the tunnel and seconds after black birds start to fly out of the tunnel and smoke and blood come out of the back of his head, but everything else is quiet, creating a lot of tension.
The protagonist is a very lonely, isolated person, who eats on his own at lunch, like many of the male protagonists in film noirs. Lots of people know him and talk to him, but he doesn't ever look like he has many good friends, apart from maybe the Brain. It seems to be that him and Emily spent a lot of time together and when they broke up he didn't have anybody that close to be with anymore.
During the films there are a few flashbacks. One of the flashbacks was when he was fighting with Emily, another was when he was thinking and a voice over was used to show what other characters in the film had said before, and the last one was when he was crying in bed with Laura and the flashbacks were of the tunnel and Emily. The flashbacks seem to show what Brendan was thinking about and it's a convention used a lot in film noirs.
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