Fractured (2019)

PC3's Horror and Exploitation Movie Scale of Awesomeness

If for nothing else, I had to sit through the film’s ninety-nine minute runtime so I could at last find out what the fuck was really going on.

Fractured is one of those mind-bending thrillers in the same vein as Identity and Jacob’s Ladder, though the plot is wholly different than either of those. It’s suspenseful as hell and has you guessing at what’s going on almost from the beginning.

The basic story is that Ray (Sam Worthington) is driving cross-country with his wife and daughter on Thanksgiving weekend. They stop off at a gas station, and while there Ray and his daughter fall off this ledge at a nearby construction site. Ray sustains a head injury and the daughter appears to have a broken arm. All pretty straight forward so far, right? At this point there has already been some odd behavior between the husband and wife, but nothing too crazy.

Well, as they leave the gas station to go to a nearby hospital, things start seeming . . . off. Ray is speeding down the highway, driving very dangerously, while his wife is oddly rooting him on to go faster, with their injured daughter in her lap. They get to the hospital and things are getting progressively more weird, with staff asking the them the strangest questions during check-in, and a little too overly concerned about folks’ blood types. Ray is acting weird, his wife is acting weird, everyone around them is acting weird.

As a viewer, you’re wondering if any of this is even happening. Then they take the daughter for a CT scan, with Ray’s wife going with her . . . and they don’t come back. Predictably, Ray becomes irate, demanding to know what happened to them, yelling at staff, sneaking through secure locations to search for them and so on. Meanwhile, the hospital staff claims his daughter has never been there.

It’s intense. But it is flawed.

The healthcare professionals out there will see problems. For instance, there is a scene where three freaking doctors, a nurse, a security guard, and two cops are all trying to talk to Ray about his problems. Now, no hospital on the planet would dedicate three MDs to one potential mental patient, especially a small town hospital like this one. And anyone who has ever worked in a small town hospital knows how unlikely it would be for them to have a psychiatrist in house in the middle of the night (a psychiatrist who calls herself a counselor at one point, which is a different thing altogether). Then there was a scene where Ray disarmed four cops with no issue whatsoever, with basically no pushback at all.

Some of this, I suppose, could be explained away as contributing to the mind-bending experience. But I think the story needed a stronger base reality to build from, one that was completely believable, while the rest of the tale could go off the rails.

Overall, it’s a good movie. It kept me guessing till the end. I did, in fact, guess a variant of what the ending is, though the filmmakers threw in an extra twist that got me.

PC3’s Horror and Exploitation Movie Scale of Awesomeness!

Gore - 4

Special Effects - 5

Nudity/Sexuality - 0

Wow Factor - 7

Acting - 7

Fear Factor - 7

Story/Plot/Originality - 6

Cinematography - 5

Sound/Music - 6

Fun Factor - 4

Fractured comes away with an overall PHEMSA of 51. Solid enough. If not for the flaws of the base reality of the hospital setting, I probably would have scored the Story category at an 8 or 9. Just as filmmakers should study the accurate portrayal of firearms in movies, they should also study accurate portrayal of occupations. People in the know will see the problems every damn time.