Twelve-year old Daniel and his seventeen-year-old brother live in a run-down German tenement building. Patrick occasionally earns a bit of money by secretly kidnapping people?s pets to collect the reward money later. In spite of his harsh environment, Daniel is able to escape into small flights of fancy. But his situation becomes more drastic the more dependent he becomes on his older brother. For a while, Daniel seems to find a friend in Bernd, a neighborhood junkie. Crude, harsh, but also poetic, ?Hochhaus? tells the story of a boy forced to grow up too soon and labor through a world that seems to have no place for him.