Pink, the protagonist, is a rock star, one of several reasons behind his apparent depressive and detached emotional state. He is first seen in an unkempt hotel room, motionless and expressionless, watching television. The opening music is the Vera Lynn recording of ”The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot”. It is revealed that Pink’s father, a British soldier, was killed in action during World War II, in Pink’s infancy.

In a flashback, Pink is a young English boy growing up in the early 1950s. Throughout his childhood, Pink longs for a father figure after he learns his father died in the war. At school, he is humiliated for writing poems in class (the poem being Pink Floyd’s ”Money”). After the teacher reads the poem out loud, Pink starts hallucinating the music video of ”Another Brick in the Wall”. Pink is also negatively affected by his overprotective mother.

As an adult, Pink eventually marries, but he and his wife soon grow apart. While he is in the United States on tour, Pink learns that his wife is having an affair. He compensates with expensive materialistic possessions and turns to a willing groupie, whom he brings back to his hotel room only to trash it in a fit of violence, terrifying the groupie out the apartment.

Pink slowly begins to lose his mind to metaphorical ”worms”. He shaves off all of his body hair and his eyebrows and, while watching The Dam Busters on television, morphs into his neo-fascist alter-ego. Pink’s manager, along with the hotel manager and some paramedics, discover Pink and inject him with drugs to enable him to perform.

The drugs cause Pink to hallucinate and he fantasises that he is a dictator and his concert is a neo-nazi rally. His followers proceed to attack ethnic minorities, and Pink holds a rally in suburban London, singing ”Waiting for the Worms”. The scene is intercut with images of animated marching hammers that goose-step across ruins. Pink screams ”Stop!” and takes refuge in the toilets at the concert venue, reciting poems.

In a climactic animated sequence, Pink, depicted as a small, almost inanimate rag doll, is on trial, and the verdict is ”to be exposed before [his] peers” and to ”tear down the wall”. Following a prolonged silence, the wall is smashed.

Several children are seen cleaning up a pile of debris after an earlier riot, with a freeze-frame on one of the children emptying a Molotov cocktail.

1982

R

027616469434

Movie

2.35:1

92

1

~$12.99

2025-06-09

2018-02-07 21:11:53