PLOT: A man desperately tries to find his wife and injured daughter after they disappear from a strange hospital.
REVIEW: FRACTURED had my attention from the moment I first heard about it because it comes from a creative team that I was very intrigued to see work together – the film was directed by Brad Anderson, whose SESSION 9 is one of my favorite horror films, from a screenplay by Alan B. McElroy, whose credits include HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS and WRONG TURN. The film that resulted from this collaboration is a thriller that Anderson directs the hell out of while McElroy does his best to keep the viewer guessing and questioning reality throughout… But I have to say I found FRACTURED to be underwhelming in the end, especially since I thought I had it all figured out within the first 15 minutes and yet Anderson and McElroy kept things running in circles for another 85 minutes.
England-born, Australia-raised actor Sam Worthington plays lead character Ray Monroe with a questionable attempt at an American accent, and as soon as we meet this guy there's a sense that he's going to be an unreliable narrator. He's troubled, arguing with his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe) on the way back from a bad Thanksgiving experience. He's a recovering alcoholic teetering on the edge of a relapse, and during a stop at a gas station he even chooses to buy some alcohol over the items his young daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) asked him to get. Once things go wrong at that gas station, resulting in Peri possibly breaking her arm, Ray's reactions are so odd that I could never fully trust the guy for the rest of the movie.
Ray and Joanne take Peri to Kirkbride Regional Hospital, where Ray falls asleep while waiting for his wife to bring his daughter back from a CAT scan recommended by the hospital's Dr. Berthram, played by the great character actor Stephen Tobolowsky. When Ray wakes up, Joanne and Peri have gone missing, and there's no indication in the hospital's records that they ever existed. Even the people who Ray knows interacted with them seem to have no memory of them.
FRACTURED makes it clear very early on that are only two possible ways this situation is going to be resolved: either we're going to find out that Ray has gone off the deep end, or he's going to be proven correct in his suspicion that the staff at Kirkbride are in on some kind of illegal scheme. Anderson and Elroy try to allow the film to have it both ways for as long as possible; the majority of the running time consists of Ray confronting different people in the hospital, demanding to know where Joanne and Peri are, while those people respond by telling him he's off his rocker. I went into the movie expecting to see a lot of scenes like that, but I wasn't expecting them to take up so much time.
All is revealed in the end, but the journey reaching that conclusion isn't as thrilling as I had hoped. I was ready for the movie to pick a path and get on it with it well before the ending, and once the climax came along things started to feel kind of silly.
The movie does look great, and Anderson and cinematographer Björn Charpentier captured some wonderful imagery in the rare moments when we venture out of the hospital. Worthington did a fine job of carrying the film on his shoulders, even though I have never been able to buy his American accents. He has to reiterate the same information over and over again, but never loses the dedication to conveying the intensity of his character's emotions.
FRACTURED is interesting in concept, so-so in execution. It's worth watching if you're a fan of thrillers, just don't expect much in the way of excitement or surprises. It's just a serviceable way to spend 100 minutes.
The film will be available to watch through the Netflix streaming service as of October 11th.