Fractured is a 2019 thriller about a man who wakes in the hospital after an accident with his daughter, where no one has any record she was admitted.
Driving the speed limit on the open roads on a Thanksgiving holiday, Ray Monroe (Sam Worthington) and his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe) are at odds, their relationship strained as speeding cars buzz by. Their young daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) keeps distracted with her headphones but needs a rest stop. They pull over at a countryside gas station where Peri suffers a terrible accident. Needing a hospital, they rush to the nearest emergency room, one already overcrowded with people seeking attention. When they at last get to see a doctor, after a lengthy processing, mother and daughter head in for more tests while Ray crashes in the lobby. When he wakes up, both Joanne and Peri are gone and the staff at the hospital claim they were never there.
Director Brad Anderson‘s curious Fractured is a weird movie, immediately planting its flag in the soil as something a little off center, making no effort to conceal its menace from the opening moments where even the rest stop is steeped in creepy. In fact, by the time they family makes it to the hospital, there’s no not seeing where it’s going, the film going all out of its way in practically telling you what is going to happen, the dimly-lit medical facility, archetypical staff and eerie music telegraphing miles ahead that things are not entirely on the level. Even a novice cinema sleuth can connect these dots.
That’s really the larger problem with Fractured, a film that has its roots in a number of other thrillers of the sort, including the far superior Michael Crichton medical chiller Coma, where patients meet odd ends. That’s not entirely bad, as plenty of movies have spun new twists with old threads, though clearly the filmmakers here are not looking to be as grounded as that movie, the story less about the plausibility of such horrors as what Ray endures than the method of doling it all out. That means it has zero mystery or suspense in setting up the premise before trying to trick us with a ‘twist’ ending that lands with a loud thud simply because none of it feels earned in getting us there.
Yes, Worthington is great, well cast as a man with a few haunts that are plenty poignant in at least setting up the inevitable. He brings genuine emotion to a role that is barely fleshed out, giving us some hope all along the way that the rest of the movie will somehow catch up with his efforts. Unfortunately, Fractured never does, the payoff all too obvious from the get go.
Still, with how transparent the whole film is, it’s probably a design choice, Fractured a movie with no challenges, a story that is clever in purpose but artless in execution. It knows the boxes to tick, knows its audience expects manipulation, then lays them all out end to end with no effort to mask a bit of it. Good work from the committed cast help, but this is not what it could and should be.