| Director | Alan Parker |
|---|---|
| Genre | art film, drama film, musical film |
| Runtime | 95 min |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Budget | $12 million |
| Box office | $22.3 million |
Pink is a depressed rock star touring the United States. As he is discovered motionless and near-catatonic in his hotel room, the traumatic experiences that have brought him to this state surface, each represented as a "brick" in a psychological wall he has constructed around himself, ultimately isolating him from the world.
In Pink's infancy during World War II, his father is killed defending the Anzio beachhead, leaving him to be raised by his overbearing mother. As a boy he discovers relics of his father's military service and death, including some bullets. Pink places one on railway tracks inside a tunnel. As a passing train fires the bullet, Pink visualizes the train towing cattle trucks filled with masked figures whose features are blurred and crude. A vision of a hostile schoolteacher then confronts him. As a student, Pink is caught writing poems and publicly humiliated by a teacher who reads one aloud before disciplining him; the teacher's own unhappiness stems from his strained marriage. Pink imagines the oppressive educational system as a nightmarish factory in which masked children are fed into a meat grinder. He fantasizes the children rebelling, burning the school, and throwing the teacher onto a bonfire.
As Pink matures, he recalls his mother's overprotectiveness as well as his troubled marriage set against the rise of his music career. While on tour, he phones home and learns of his wife's infidelity when a man answers. His alienation and rage intensifying, Pink fortifies his wall with materialistic possessions. The bitter and detached Pink brings a groupie to his hotel room, but she is driven away when Pink flies into a violent outburst and destroys the room over his inability to connect with her. Alone and despondent, he reviews the bricks of his wall and finally completes it.
Trapped behind the wall, Pink remains in his room and begins losing his mind to metaphorical "worms". He shaves off all his body hair and watches the war film The Dam Busters (1955), which reminds him of his lost father. In his mind, Pink, as a boy, searches through battle trenches, is frightened away by his traumatised adult self, and flees to a railway station where soldiers unite with their loved ones, but cannot find his father. In reality, Pink's manager finds him unresponsive and has a paramedic inject him with drugs so he can perform. Dragged to a limousine, he hallucinates a fleshy carapace forming over him, which he tears away to reveal a severe militaristic figure.
Pink envisions himself as a fascist orator and his concert as a neo-Nazi rally in London, and his followers attack minority groups in the streets. Eventually reaching a breaking point, Pink rejects the wall that has imprisoned him, and he cowers in a bathroom stall inside the venue as he mentally puts himself on trial. The surreal courtroom is an arena populated by writhing worms and grotesque figures acting as a prosecutor and judge; Pink himself is a passive rag doll charged with "showing feelings of an almost human nature". Distorted versions of his teacher and wife testify against him, and a version of his mother tries to take him home. The judge, represented as a giant walking pair of buttocks, sentences him to "be exposed before [his] peers" and orders the wall torn down. The battered wall explodes into rubble.
While Pink's ultimate fate remains unknown, children in reality clear debris and collect bricks, one of them emptying a Molotov cocktail. Over the credits, the final song shifts perspective to those outside of walls such as Pink's, who exhaust themselves battering their hearts against it.