Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fractured’ on Netflix, a Preposterous Thriller Full of Absurd Twists and the Reddest of Herrings

Fractured is the latest title on the “Netflix and Chills” slate, a series of movies the streaming service is rolling out for pumpkin-carving season. It stars Sam Worthington of Avatar fame, and promises hairpin plot twists lined with banana peels and enough red herrings to feed an oceanful of great whites. Frankly, it’s not much of a chiller, and more of a thriller, but will it be killer, or just filler?

FRACTURED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Monroe family — dad Ray (Sam Worthington), mom Joanne (Lucy Rabe) and adorable daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) — is on a car trip for Thanksgiving. Ray and Joanne bicker cuz their marriage sucks. They stop to pee. Peri loses a beloved object, and since she’s six, that means armageddon’s near. As Joanne looks for it in the gas station restroom, Ray searches the back seat, and a parent’s worst nightmare plays out: Snapped caution tape flutters in the foreground of shots. Peri wanders over to a nearby construction site, is spooked by a stray dog and stumbles into a concrete pit, just out of her dad’s reach. He falls in with her, and they possibly pass through a wormhole or time warp before they hit bottom. More on that in a minute.

Ray comes to. He has abrasions on his face and head. Peri probably has a broken arm, but seems mostly OK. He loads her and Joanne into the car and they head to the nearest hospital, where a nightmare scenario begins with an ER crammed with people in pain, waiting hours to be seen. Every hospital staff member Ray talks to is kind of cold and weird and suspicious. For some reason, during one staffer’s intrusive questioning about Ray’s dead first wife and past alcoholism, Joanne proudly mentions that he’s assistant manager of the kitchen and bath design center at Craft Home Improvement, which makes me think they engage in some pretty kinky roleplay. The scene worsens: the hospital doesn’t take the insurance he gets for being assistant manager of the kitchen and bath design center at Craft Home Improvement. Seriously, eff being assistant manager of the kitchen and bath design center at Craft Home Improvement!

The doc (Stephen Tobolowsky) says Peri needs a CAT scan. Orderlies take her and Joanne on the elevator while Ray dozes off in the waiting room — and he never sees them again. Maybe all the ominous, discordant music, dim lighting and casually obvious visual cues, e.g. that cut on Ray’s head that wasn’t there before and is suddenly bleeding, are beginning to mean something. Staff says Ray checked himself in for a head injury, and they have no record of his wife and kid. He gets mad and frustrated, and they start saying things like SIR THERE’S NO NEED TO RAISE YOUR VOICE and CALL SECURITY.

So is this an alternate reality? Did Ray fall through time and space? Or is it a conspiracy to gaslight Ray so docs and nurses can take his family downstairs and sell them to human traffickers or grind them into burger for the cafeteria or feed them to their pet dragon? They inject Ray with a sedative and lock him in a room, but he counters with three self-administered adrenaline shots that just happened to be lying around and smashes a window with his fist because that always makes everything better. More doctors and nurses and a couple of cops and a security guard and a shrink get involved, all of them acting with various degrees of unprofessionalism. What the devil is going on? Can we trust everything we’ve seen, since the movie is titled Fractured and its narrative is entirely from the perspective of someone with a head injury?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Dumb ones. Mostly dumb ones. Fractured director Brad Anderson handled similar unreliable-narrator material with The Machinist, a.k.a. That Movie Where Christian Bale was Disturbingly Skinny, but that was a better movie.

Performance Worth Watching: Among the fishy hospital staff, Tobolowsky does the best job of making us think they’re all in on the super-contrived anti-Ray plot to use his wife and kid as slave labor for their secret space Dorito mines beneath the hospital. Or maybe they’re just giving each other those sideways glances to make sure nobody upsets the crazy man. Who knows!

Memorable Dialogue: “The mind can sometimes create an alternate reality — a false reality — to shield itself from trauma,” says the shrink, who I assume moonlights as a metaphysicist.

Sex and Skin: None. TBTTDWRAWDTF: Too Busy Trying To Determine What’s Real And What’s Delusion To F—.

Our Take: This isn’t a spoiler, promise: As I was watching Fractured, the strongest argument for Joann being a figment of Ray’s traumatized noodle was the pride in her voice when she pointed out that he’s assistant manager of the kitchen and bath design center at Craft Home Improvement. I do not intend to degrade any of you assistant managers of kitchen and bath design centers out there, but come on. In a movie full of gaping lapses in logic and ludicrous twists, this clearly is its least convincing moment.

Fractured is a real eye-roller from the Preposterous Thriller sub-subgenre (in the main category Thriller, sub-category Psychological Thriller). These movies tend to invest all their narrative nickels in plot and spend about a half-penny on character. They’re often overwrought, poker-faced and full of crap dialogue. In the best cases, Preposterous Thrillers deliver a bone-jarring twist or two, and are therefore entertaining. But they need to stay a step or two ahead of us, while also engaging us intellectually or emotionally, and maybe making comment on the strength or folly of human nature. They’re difficult to execute. And when poorly done, they’re dissatisfying, messy and overly manipulative. Hitchcock was the master of the Preposterous Thriller — just watch Suspicion, Spellbound or Psycho.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Fractured is Hitchcock if he fell down and hit his head and concussed himself and shot a movie anyway.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Fractured on Netflix