Fractured (2019)
Directed by Brad Anderson
Driving cross-country, Ray and his wife and daughter stop at a highway rest area where his daughter falls and breaks her arm. After a frantic rush to the hospital and a clash with the check-in nurse, Ray is finally able to get her to a doctor. While the wife and daughter go downstairs for an MRI, Ray, exhausted, passes out in a chair in the lobby. Upon waking up, they have no record or knowledge of Ray's family ever being checked in.
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And then “Fractured” becomes a riff on “The Lady Vanishes” (or “Flightplan” for modern audiences), in which we have to decide if Ray is crazy or if everyone at the hospital is conspiring to make him so.
Whereas a film like “Flightplan” merely elevated Alfred Hitchcock’s locomotive mystery onto an airplane, “Fractured” sews the story into the knotted fabric of the American healthcare system, a curious wrinkle that helps to endow some (very) familiar beats with a fresh palette of anxieties.
Unfolding like Jodie Foster’s “Flightplan” (but in a hospital) Ray enlists law enforcement to investigate the shady hospital who insists Ray came in for a head related injury following a car accident (don’t they always?)
Alan B. McElroy‘s script is lifting elements from The Lady Vanishes , The Shining , Shudder Island , and many more – even Anderson’s own Session 9 – resulting in an unfortunately unoriginal script.
And then “Fractured” becomes a riff on “The Lady Vanishes” (or “Flightplan” for modern audiences), in which we have to decide if Ray is crazy or if everyone at the hospital is conspiring to make him so.
A(nother) disposable Netflix thriller that fails to do anything with its potentially clever premise, Brad Anderson’s “Fractured” isn’t the first modern riff on “The Lady Vanishes” — not even close — but it’s one of the few that finds a compelling new backdrop for that Agatha Christie-esque tale of conspiracy and gaslighting.
Hitchcock was the master of the Preposterous Thriller — just watch Suspicion , Spellbound or Psycho .
Anderson has already made better movies about spooky buildings (Session 9) and crumbling mental states (The Machinist), and 1988’s The Vanishing already gave us a more interesting take on the disappearing wife.
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Hitchcock was the master of the Preposterous Thriller — just watch Suspicion , Spellbound or Psycho .
Hitchcock was the master of the Preposterous Thriller — just watch Suspicion , Spellbound or Psycho .
This is disappointing because Anderson is a wholly capable director with quantifiable successes ( Session 9 and The Machinist ) under his belt.
Anderson burst onto the scene in 2001 with his spooky indie Session 9 , about a potentially haunted abandoned mental hospital.
Instead, he made some of the defining thrillers of the decade (Session 9 and The Machinist), worked on iconic television shows like The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, and has seemingly found his niche as a commercial director-for-hire on unmemorable works like Beirut.
Director Brad Anderson, who most recently helmed 2018's John Hamm spy drama Beirut , is a proven genre specialist who knows his way around a medical facility, having first gained attention in horror circles for 2001's Session 9 , a thriller about an abandoned psychiatric hospital.
The workmanlike career has led to several stand-outs, including “Session 9,” “ The Machinist ,” and “ Transsiberian .”
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 .
Director Brad Anderson, working from a middling but covers-the-basics Alan B. McElroy script (he wrote a “Left Behind,” a few “Wrong Turns,” “The Perfect Guy,” etc.), concentrates on Worthington and visual and aural (muffled sound) ways to show Ray’s increasingly frayed state of mind.
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But as the story builds, Anderson and screenwriter Alan B. McElroy (Wrong Turn) struggle to find compelling new corridors for the characters to wander down.
Written by Alan B. McElroy ( Wrong Turn , Spawn ), Fractured wants to keep you uncertain.
Screenwriter Alan McElroy, who has extensive genre credits ( Spawn , Wrong Turn , Ballistic: Ecks vs .
The script by Alan McElroy, the man behind the “Wrong Turn” series, isn’t exactly blazing with sharp dialogue, and so without any interesting production design elements and forgettable, flat characters, we’re left with nothing to hold onto except the inevitable twist.
Some may label it as a lesser Shutter Island (which is fair), but I was still sucked into its tale of parental anxiety.