Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
More On:
sam worthington
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the movie Fractured on Netflix.
It’s Halloween month, and Netflix is celebrating with five new original films for its “Netflix and Chills” horror slate. This week that film is Fractured, now streaming today. Fractured is more of a thriller than a horror, starring Sam Worthington (Avatar) as a man desperate to find his wife and child in a hospital that’s determined to thwart him at every turn. The film was written by Alan B. McElroy, who is best known for writing the fourth Halloween film, and directed by Brad Anderson, best known for 2004’s The Machinist and 2001’s Session 9.
In Fractured, Worthington plays a man named Ray who drives his daughter Peri to the hospital after she is scared by a dog and falls and hurts her arm on a family road trip. Ray has been having marital problems with his wife Joanne (an under-utilized Lily Rabe), but the parents unite to get their daughter to the hospital as fast as humanly possible. Peri doesn’t seem seriously injured, but upon arrival, Ray is immediately suspicious of the hospital staff. The nurse who checks him in asks weird pointed questions about his past alcoholism and his dead first wife. She also seems entirely too interested in his daughter’s organs. The doctors are also acting weird—one tells Peri she has the “most beautiful eyes” he’s ever seen.
The doctors tell Ray and Joanne they want to perform a procedure on Peri just to be safe. Only Joanne is allowed in the room with her. Ray waits outside. He waits and waits, but his wife and daughter never emerge. Worse, when he follows up, the staff tell him his wife and daughter were never there to begin with. Ray is determined to uncover what this shady hospital did to his family, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get them back.
WHAT IS THE FRACTURED PLOT TWIST?
Eventually, Ray gets the police involved to help him find his missing wife and child. When he and the detective retrace the scene where his daughter fell, the detective starts to question Ray as a suspect. She suggests to Ray that there was no dog when his daughter fell. She says that Ray threw a rock at his daughter in anger, causing her to fall off the ledge, and then killed his wife. She demands to know where the bodies are. While the detective describes this, we see the scene play out that way on screen. It’s confusing: Is that really what happened? Is Ray crazy? Or is the detective in on the plot against Ray, like the hospital staff?
The police start to arrest him, but then Ray glances up and sees the dog that scared his daughter. Aha! It did happen! Ray escapes and gets back to the hospital, where he finds his wife and daughter undergoing some kind of weird organ donation procedure. He kills the security guard, blows up the hospital room, and escapes with his wife and daughter alive! Hooray!
Except… wait, just kidding, it was all in his head, and none of that actually happened. Fooled ya!
HOW DOES FRACTURED END?
Are you guys ready for the real Fractured plot twist? It’s the one that the movie promised us wasn’t the plot twist at the end of Act 2! Like the detective said, it turns out Ray killed his wife and daughter. When he saw what he had done, he went crazy, and his mind made up a story that his daughter didn’t die. But in real life, he stashed his daughter and wife’s bodies in his trunk, then drove to the hospital. Ray showed up at the hospital alone, which is why the staff was acting so weird around him.
When Ray broke into the hospital at the end, he didn’t help his wife and daughter escape—he stole a random person that the doctors were operating on. Now that random guy is in the back of Ray’s car as he drives into the sunset, convulsing. Fun!
WHAT IS THE MEANING BEHIND THE FRACTURED ENDING? DOES THE FRACTURED ENDING MAKE SENSE?
It’s very Alfred Hitchcock, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as eloquently done as Psycho or The Lady Vanishes. I don’t think it’s that deep, and I don’t think it particularly makes sense. If Ray’s daughter and wife were never actually the hospital, then who was the doctor talking to when he told her she had the most beautiful eyes? Did Ray just imagine that entire thing? Which parts are real, and which parts aren’t? It’s impossible to tell, and thus doesn’t make for a very satisfying plot twist. Oh, well. Onto the next Netflix thriller!
