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.
