Movies
[Fantastic Fest Review] Netflix’s ‘Fractured’ Unravels With Familiar Psychological Thrills
In the early aughts, director Brad Anderson delivered a one-two punch of mind-bending thrillers that captured the unraveling of fragile minds with Session 9 and The Machinist. From there, Anderson further proved himself adept at creating taut suspense with series and films like The Killing and The Call. His latest continues that trend, a hospital set psychological thriller meant to keep you guessing right up until the very end. While Fractured doesn’t succeed in its attempt at ambiguity, Anderson’s direction does deliver an entertaining enough thriller to keep you engaged.
Sam Worthington stars as Ray Monroe, an everyman type on a road trip with his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe) and young daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) to visit family for Thanksgiving. The holidays are a stressful time for many families, which proves to be the case for Ray and Joanne as well. When they pull over at a rest stop, Peri falls at a nearby construction site and hurts her arm, causing the family to rush to the nearest hospital. While Joanne and Peri head off with the doctor to get an MRI, Ray falls asleep in the waiting room. Waking hours later, when he goes to check on them, the on call staff have no record of his wife or daughter having ever been there at all. Thus begins a taut conspiracy thriller that sees Ray determined to find his family at any cost.
Written by Alan B. McElroy (Wrong Turn, Spawn), Fractured wants to keep you uncertain. Is there a sinister plot afoot at the hospital that the tenured staff wants to keep covered, or is the head injury that Ray received trying to thwart Peri’s accident confusing the truth? Or maybe there’s something else going on entirely? It all sounds great in theory, but Fractured seems to borrow from other psychological thrillers we’ve seen before and gets a little too heavy handed with the breadcrumbs too early. Meaning that for the savvier viewer, certain clues will have you solving this twisted puzzle long before the answers start coming.
Even still, Worthington turns in one of his most engaging performances yet, and Anderson’s direction offers up dynamic sequences of tension and visual thrills that keeps the momentum hurling forward at a brisk pace. New players keep entering the fold, all with a level of uncertainty and untrustworthiness about them. Subtle and not so subtle clues muddy the waters, hoping to keep the viewer off kilter. It all builds to an exciting climax, though its impact might be mitigated by your ability to solve the mystery well ahead of Ray.
For casual viewers not well versed in thrillers, Fractured is worth the watch. It’s a showcase of Anderson’s ability to take a familiar story and spin a compelling, unrelenting thriller. With the hospital serving as the central location and the entire narrative resting on Worthington, this small thriller does feel larger in scope than it is. But it is a narrative we’ve seen many times before, giving this a serious level of predictability no matter how hard Anderson tries to throw you off course. It doesn’t help that the core themes have been explored by Anderson before, in much better films.
Fractured releases on Netflix on October 11.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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