THIS is not just a Californian high school flick.

Yes, it's has got some of the vital ingredients: cliques, outcasts, beauties and jocks.

But Rian Johnson's brooding thriller Brick wraps them in the moody, adult aura of a 1930s noir movie, banishing pom-poms and play-offs in favour of drug-dealers and death.

Loner Brendan Frye (Jason Gordon-Levitt) gets a tearful phone-call from his ex-girlfriend Emily (Lost's Emilie de Ravin).

She mumbles, terrified, about "the brick" and pleads for his help.

Then, she vanishes.

Brendan, still mesmerised by the vulnerable Emily, enlists the help of his one friend, The Brain, to investigate her disappearance.

Consumed with finding out what has happened to her, he becomes embroiled with femme fatale Laura, brutish Tugger, stoner Dode, seductive Kara, jock Brad and, ominously, drug baron The Pin (Lukas Haas).

Brendan, inspired by the jaded heroes of detective writer Dashiell Hammett, is incredibly cool and deliberate, cutting deep with his deliciously piercing dialogue and showing no fear as he scours the underworld for the truth about Emily's death.

"Throw one at me if you want, hash head," he bites, when he looks like he might get yet another beating for sticking his nose in where it doesn't belong.

"I've got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you."

This film is too intense and mysterious to be a spoof, but Johnson's school subversion still injects flashes of humour like when Brendan meets The Pin in his menacing basement lair and then goes upstairs to the dealer's mum's suburban kitchen and is offered a glass of juice.

Compelling, dark and rightly described as this year's Donnie Darko compounded by an atmospheric sound track composed in Bournemouth by Johnson's cousin Nathan Johnson it's no surprise Brick won the Sundance Film Festival's special jury prize for Originality of Vision.

See Saturday's Echo for an interview with Nathan Johnson

  • See it at Lighthouse (not Sun)