268.
Fractured
7/10
I have been meaning to see this movie a while back because the principal looked very interesting to me. Fractured slides in for the letter 'F'. What I know from this movie is that Sam Worthington is going to be playing a Dad on hospital grounds whose Wife and Daughter go through the hospital curtain and aren't seen again. We are about to embark on a psychological thriller which may leave us with some twists and turns and I'm really hoping so.
We are following a family of three making the trip home on Thanksgiving but we are already thrust into trouble as Worthington's character Ray and his wife Joanne, played by Lily Rabe are showing their break down in marriage., Trying to hide it from their young daughter, they pull over at a gas station for some new batteries for the little girl's walkman as well as a toilet break. As Ray is inside, he grabs a few small bottles of alcohol, which he can't afford when it's cash only, so he doesn't even grab the batteries. Heading back to the car, Peri, the daughter claims she has left something in the toilet to Ray stays with her at the car whilst Joanne goes to check. Ray spills his coffee, Peri wonders off a little near a construction hole and when Ray looks back up, a dog is confronting Peri. He tries to throw a stone to scare it off but ends up scaring Peri too, who falls down the hole and with a last-ditch attempt to grab her, Ray goes down too.
He wakes a little while later to Joanne's screams and Peri coming around with a broken arm. When they arrive at the hospital, Joanne and Peri head through for a CT scan after being seen to by a couple of nurses and a doctor and Ray has to wait in the waiting room until he passes out with exhaustion. Before dropping off he sees a couple of bodies being wheeled in with a cheeky brown envelope being passed from the waiting doctor to the ambulance drivers.
When he wakes, he asks how long his family will be but shit starts to hit the fan when he is told they were never there. Now my first instinct is that she has left as they were going to break up by the looks of things and she's done a runner to her family's house. Ray was already upset at the staff when they signed in as they wouldn't take his insurance and asked about his ex-wife who died in a car crash. They even asked if he wanted his daughter on the organ donation list. He causes nothing but tension at the hospital until he enlists two police officers to help him. From some history of movies, the police usually tell the character not to worry and that nothing strange is happening but these two seem to be onside. That's until we look at security tapes, which are non-conclusive and only ever show Ray at the desk, other places in the hospital have broken cameras.
Ray has lost any patience he had left and still thinks something is up at the hospital. They say that the CT scan room is upstairs but even I saw the lift taking his family down. He is taken to the bed that they all sat around when first arriving and Ray finds his daughter's scarf, which only strengthens his case. They bring the doctor down who seen to them when they arrived but he says that Ray was alone, erratic and had a nasty cut on his head. causing these hallucinations. He is instead invited into a meeting with a counselor at the hospital who believes she can help. She starts with questions about the last time he had a drink, how he feels about his ex-wife as he had brought her name up when he first got to the hospital. She pressures him with questions of the fact he knows what happened to Joanne and Peri but he doesn't want to face it. In the end, she gets the police to take them all to that construction site. The police dogs smell the scarf and heads down to the fall area. They move the snow and there is a shed load of blood. Blood that doesn't come from the cut on Ray's head surely, and nothing that would happen from a simple broken arm. Now I'm thinking what the hell has he done with the bodies? He then sees the dog again but so does everyone else. The shrink knows that it doesn't mean Ray is telling the truth and insists on him telling them where the body is. Instead, he turns in to James Bond, steals a gun and knows how to handle is as he locks them all in the gas station toilet and heads back to the hospital in a cop car. He steals a lab court, jumps the security guard in the lift and has a key to go down to the basement to find out what is really going on.
Hiding in a dark room, he looks into the hallway to see doctors carting about trays with boxes labeled organs. He breaks into a surgical room just as a team of doctors, including the one who said he had never seen him before is about to operate on his daughter. He sees his wife drugged up in a wheelchair, picks his daughter up and wheels them both out, shooting the doctors on the way. Now I'm wondering whether this is some actual hillbilly backward shit hospital. Finally making it to the car, he puts them in the back and makes a break for it before the police arrive. The camera pans to Ray's panicked face and you can just tell there's a little something more to come. I'm expecting the bodies to have been taken from the morgue or something and the family is dead in the back, but no, maybe the police would have told him that they found them. Instead, it's just a random young lad in the back who he has stolen mid-surgery and we are finally going to get some answers.
We flashback to the moment it all happened and Peri wondering off is the final straw for Ray and he loses his mind, throwing the stone at her and as she falls and he misses the grab, the impact on the ground kills her. Joanne finds them both and he pushes her, causing her to fall and impale against a metal rod, also killing her. This causes him to create a reality that convinces him they are both still alive when in truth, he has stashed them both in his boot and the movie ends as the camera pans over the boot, showing the bodies. Crazy fool.
This was an enjoyable one-time watch of a movie. I say one-time watch because once you know the ending, it'll be rare that you would want to go back and watch it again without the enjoyment of the twists and turns. The storyline kept me guessing and questioning my reasonings which would only be a good sign to a movie that is intended to draw you in. Not at any point did I lose interest and not at any point was I sure that I had figured it all out, even up to the closing scene.
The cast wasn't a massive thing for me in this movie. I've seen Sam Worthington in many things and after bingeing American Horror Story I recognise the cast member playing Joanne as Lily Rabe through that series. It is hard to claim that there are any more main characters rather than Ray because everyone comes on the screen at moments with Ray as the central role. That doesn't mean that they didn't give a good account for themselves though, each was good in their roles but the main man that we were following was very good. Sam's character's descent into madness was very very well portrayed. He had me convinced for a little while that there was seriously something up with the hospital but slowly you saw him slip into madness and his lie.
For me, it was enjoyable at the time but with some downers of course. The movie did look a little grainy, dark and plain but I wouldn't complain if this was simply to add to the mood of the movie, but that would be just to As already mentioned, it would be a little hard to go back and watch this with the same level of enjoyment but maybe watching it with someone who hasn't seen this would add a new sense of enjoyment to find out if they would work out what is happening. If you fancy some sort of a thriller that'll get you thinking, go and get Fractured. I wonder if he would end up getting caught. At least this Netflix movie came with some more answers for the ending.
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