Title – Fractured (2019)

Director – Brad Anderson (The Machinist)

Cast – Sam Worthington, Lily Rabe, Stephen Tobolowsky

Plot – After an accident at a construction site injures his young daughter, Ray Monroe (Worthington) finds his family’s trip to hospital becoming a living nightmare when he awakes to find that the hospital has no record of them checking his daughter in.

“I just want to see my wife and daughter”

Review by Eddie on 28/10/2019

Much like Bird Box last year, Netflix have struck viewer gold with Fractured, a new thriller that is finding itself talked about on the inter-webs thanks to its twisty and turny nature but just as Bird Box was over-hyped beyond all recognition for what was a film that was really quite bad, Brad Anderson’s Sam Worthington starring thriller isn’t any better than that diabolical effort.

It’s a shame, Anderson has long been a director that has delivered a mix of fantastic films like the amazing The Machinist and Session 9 and the genuinely bad The Call and Vanishing on 7^th Street and a collection of noteworthy TV show episodes for the likes of Boardwalk Empire and Treme but his dropped the ball again here as he follows Worthington’s clearly not fully functioning concerned father Ray Monroe, who is worried about the whereabouts of his wife and child after they are forced to visit the hospital emergency room.

It’s a Hitchcockian like set-up, but one that ends up as nothing more than a pale imitation of those type of unnerving thrillers as there’s never that much mystery here that remains a surprise, as Monroe spends the majority of the film running around hospital rooms harassing staff members and profusely sweating as he tries to figure out exactly what is going on.

In the early stages of the film it feels as though Anderson shows us too much about what has happened, reveals too much about Monroe’s past, so from very early on we’re made too feel a certain way about what is transpiring in front of us, which includes the fact Monroe isn’t exactly the most trustworthy of narrators to tell a story.

To be fair to Worthington, whose as good as his been in years as Monroe, he seems actually interested in the role unlike much of his post-Avatar career and had the film managed to feel more unpredictable and plausible, Fractured may’ve been able to be a fully-fledged guilty pleasure, the likes of which are few and far between on Netflix’s original offering smorgasbord.

What we are left with as a final product is an increasingly dull, far-fetched and frustrating experience, one that would be akin to taking a tour of your local hospital as that’s exactly what it feels like as Monroe hurriedly races around the facility that he feels has dealt with his wife and child in a nefarious way.

Final Say –

Initial promise very quickly gives way to a very bad thriller, that seemingly thinks its fooling us all into believing its far smarter than it indeed is, making Brad Anderson’s latest disappointment a missed opportunity to create a film worthy of all the talk its generated.

1 get well soon balloon out of 5