TL;DR – While there is an interesting concept at play here, some clunky delivery stops it from being what it could have been    

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Review –

I’m not a parent, but I can say with some certainty that having your child go missing would be one of the biggest fears that you could have. This is why it is so commonly used in film/tv/video games as a way to draw people in because it is a fear we all have and can quickly internalise. There have been some films that have used this technique to real aplomb and others that use it for a quick shorthand to get us to engage with the protagonist. Today we look at a film that tries to do both.

So to set the scene, Ray (Sam Worthington), his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe), and daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) are on the long drive home after a stressful thanksgiving meal at with Joanne’s family. Ray is a recovering alcoholic and Joanne’s dad kept asking him to have some wine, which leads to tension in the car on the way home. They pull over at a random roadside stop because Peri needed to use the toilet only for her to lose her little makeup container. As they search Peri gets spooked by a dog and falls into a construction pit. They rush her to the local ER and as a precaution they run a CAT scan to make sure there is no bleeding and that is the last time Ray saw his wife and daughter and no one knows where they went.

Now it becomes very clear very quickly that there are only two real endpoints that this film can go after the original set up. The first is that the hospital did something untoward with Peri and Joanne and it tried to cover it up. Or when Ray hit his head landing in the construction pit he suffered a head injury and thus he is confused with what happened. Now I think the film does a good job of not revealing its hand as to which is the right one for most of its runtime. A lot of that comes from Sam Worthington and his acting as the concerned father. You do really feel that he is looking for his family, but there is always that head injury there reminding you that he might not be a reliable narrator. This also expands to some of the supporting cast with Dr Jacobs (Adjoa Andoh) and two police officers (Lauren Cochrane & Shane Dean) going through moments where they do and do not trust Ray.

While the premise is solid if not that original, and the cast is good, there are factors that do hold it back and to fully explore them we need to talk about the ending so there will be [SPOILERS] ahead. The first thing that really detracts from the whole proceedings is the musical score. For most of the run time there is this sinister piano arrangement that they use over and over again. This is the kind of music that you would expect in say a horror film where there a bunch of kids are walking through a haunted house waiting to be picked off one by one by some ghoul. Here at best it is distracting and at worst it pulls you out of the film. Also as the film goes on the plausibility of one side of the story being true get pushed to the breaking point. Why would a hospital with a secret organ harvesting-for profit underworld take one but not both parents away leaving a potential witness just lying around? And it only gets less plausible from there leaving the big reveal to be perplexing but not surprising.

In the end, do we recommend Fractured? Eh, probably not. I mean, it is a solid film with a good cast, there is just nothing really engaging enough for me to really say that you should check it out. Though it is an eye opening look at the American medical system.          

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Fractured
Directed by – Brad Anderson
Written by – Alan B. McElroy
Music by – Anton Sanko
Cinematography by – Björn Charpentier
Edited by – Robert Mead
Production/Distribution Companies – Koji Productions, Crow Island Films & Netflix
Starring – Sam Worthington, Lily Rabe, Lucy Capri, Adjoa Andoh, Stephen Tobolowsky, Lauren Cochrane, Shane Dean, Chris Sigurdson & Chad Bruce      
Rating – Australia: MA15+