Netflix’s new release Fractured, directed by Brad Anderson, is a psychological thriller, reminiscent of the 2010 film Shutter Island, which keeps you guessing right until the very end.
The film revolves around a family of three who encounter a crisis when their young daughter, Peri (Lucy Capri) falls into a construction site, after being scared by a dog, fracturing her arm. The father named Ray Monroe (Marcus Wright), dives in after his falling daughter and obtains a head injury himself, despite throwing a rock at the dog to scare it away. The family then travel to the emergency room to get their daughter checked out, Rays wife, Joanna Monroe (Lily Rabe) goes with their daughter to get her to the CT scan and Ray falls asleep.
When Ray awakens and asked reception of the whereabouts of his wife and daughter, she had no record them. This marks the first twist of the film, despite it being somewhat predictable, it leaves room for the following turns to be completely unexpected. Ray proceeds to go on a rampage throughout the hospital in an attempt to find his family, convinced that the hospital have taken them, even enlisting the help of the police. Ray is repeatedly told by staff that he came to the hospital alone. Ray is then introduced to a psychiatric nurse who reveals that earlier he asked for the whereabouts of a woman named Abby, not Joanna and Peri. The audience learn that Abby was Ray’s first wife who was killed in a car crash, later it is revealed that it was Ray who was driving the car. Along with the police, psychiatrist and hospital staff, Ray revisits the construction site where he finds his daughters compact, but also a pool of her blood.
A moment of self doubt ensues, with Ray questioning who he threw the rock at, but when the same dog that scared his daughter reappears, he is reassured of his innocence as well as his sanity. Additionally, the audience also have to convince themselves to trust Ray again, despite becoming aware of his mental decline. Ray gains an access key to the hospital from the psychiatrist before locking her, along with the others in a cupboard. After somewhat calmly choking a security guard to death who catches him in the elevator, he then finds Peri in a haunting scene about to get her organs harvested. Joanna is also in the room, claiming the doctors drugged them – Ray grabs his family and manages to escape.
If the film simply ended here I would be disappointed in the predictability of the film, but there is one final twist which makes this psychological thriller truly haunting. A series of flashbacks whilst Ray is driving him and his supposed family home reveals that Peri actually died from the fall and Ray accidently killed his wife after pushing her out of anger after she discovered Peri was dead, with the dark irony being his family were in his trunk the whole time. The use of the rear view mirror was an extremely creative way to portray that it was not his wife and child in the back of the car, but a stranger who he had taken from surgery. Overall, the film is an interesting insight into grief and the massive impact it can have on the brain, as Anderson depicts it takes a man’s sanity and leaves him with nothing. If anything, Fractured will certainly leave your nerves fractured due to the copious amount of tension that the film possesses.
Photo Credit: Netflix