“Session 9” director Brad Anderson returns to Fantastic Fest with “Fractured,” a soon-to-Netflix thriller that feels like a lost episode of “The Twilight Zone“…but maybe one that’d be better off lost.
Written by Alan B. McElroy, “Fractured” begins with a family of three on the long drive home from a Thanksgiving visit with the grandparents. The day didn’t go well, so things are tense between Ray Monroe (Sam Worthington) and his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe) even before a terrible accident befalls their chipper daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) at a dilapidated gas station. They race to a nearby hospital where mom and daughter are ushered down to the lower level to have some tests run. But as hours stretch by, Ray gets no word. And when he asks to see them, the nurse says there are no patients under that name. Ray fears he’s being gaslit and that some horrible fate has hit his family in the hospital’s murky depths. To rescue them, he will break rules and windows to chase down the truth, calling out doctors and calling on the police to locate his missing wife and child. But as the investigation unfurls, we’re given hints that things are not quite what they seem.
Ahead of the screening, Anderson teased there’d be elements in the film you would likely miss the first time through that prove clues to its mystery. Sadly, these clues aren’t subtle. They are tropes used in psychological thrillers for decades, like jarringly corny dialogue that breaks from a tense tone or reaction shots that flag something strange is going on in a seemingly mundane scene. Then, there’s one moment that’s such a warning sign for a BIG FAT TWIST that they may as well have set off an alarm. Which is to say, the ending of “Fractured” can easily be predicted from its inciting incident. So everything that followed was less fun and more a slog. For all the feints “Fractured” injects into its journey, it tips its hand too hard to take the rest too seriously.
Not helping matters is Worthington, whose performance is sufficient but never scintillating or even all that interesting. His chief move is grimacing, which does little to create suspense. When he’s opposite Rabe, she does the heavy lifting, folding frustration into lips knitted tightly into a frown and eyes glittering with anger and tears. But she’s quickly whisked away, and we’re left with Worthington running around in mediocre action hero mode, as he lacks the sparking charisma of Bruce Willis, Liam Neeson, or Jodie Foster. So he brings nothing fresh to this thriller. Still, it’s not fair to blame Worthington for this movie falling short. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
It’s easy to imagine how a leading man with more volatile energy (think Ben Affleck, Michael Shannon, Chris Pine) could have given a more mercurial performance that might have made McElroy’s red herring points play better. But Worthington’s performance is so doggedly one-note that such fun is thwarted. And Anderson’s execution makes matters worse. His cinematography shines a light on clues where they might have been more intriguing tucked in shadow. His direction of his performers shifts tone so sharply that savvy audiences will smell a rat fast. And the film’s pacing in a pivotal scene aggravatingly telegraphs a reveal that comes an hour and a half later.
The mystery of what happened to Ray’s family feels like a “Twilight Zone” episode in that it’s about an average man stumbling into a world gone mad, where nothing seems to add up and he fears his own mind might snap under the effort of putting it together. The hope is that “Fractured” would push its audiences to half of that mental strain. That’s the fun it promises with its premise. But instead, Anderson underestimates the audience, using tropes that are so old that they date at least back to the 1959 TV series. And so, the thrill of this new film is already long, long gone. [D]