REVIEW: The Broken [2008]

Rating: R | Runtime: 93 minutes
Release Date: November 26th 2008 (France) / January 9th, 2009 (USA)
Studio: Gaumont/Columbia TriStar Films / After Dark Films
Director(s): Sean Ellis
Writer(s): Sean Ellis

We’ll have a chat about those fragments.

It takes guts and talent to adapt your Oscar-nominated short film into a full-length feature—especially for it to turn out as good as it did as a debut. I know my love for Sean Ellis’ Cashback may be extreme, but the visuals are stunning and the story structure is very inventive. So, I was greatly anticipating his sophomore effort, the horror film The Brøken.

Expectations weren’t the highest after After Dark picked up distribution for a limited run, but I was looking forward to some creepiness and suspense. Upon finally viewing it, however, my opinion is mixed. It’s undoubtably an ambitious undertaking, but I can’t shake the feeling that its 88-minute runtime might have been better served as a short instead. Frankly, the film feels as though it’s already an expanded version of a small-scale success story. Unfortunately, this somewhat fractured tale was created at a length that perhaps overstepped its weight.

The story still intrigues despite its familiarity. A mirror breaks during the course of a surprise birthday party for the patriarch of the McVey family, locking the five people in attendance into a world of confusion and darkness. Their evil doppelgängers from the mirror world have caught a glimpse of them and are looking to escape by taking over their identities. Each shattering sound we hear becomes the entrance of a villainous version of our leads who’s looking for blood and a spot among humans.

The ideas that a plot like this conjure are numerous, but Ellis decides to keep things subtle and interior by making us guess about whether what we’re seeing is real or just happening in Gina McVey’s injured mind. We can sense the change in the characters’ actions to believe they’ve been replaced, but we’re seeing those shifts through Gina’s eyes after a death-defying car collision. So, until the end, the film exists as a giant question mark. An enigma consisting of psychological mutations or physical replacements—the latter of which means murdering the real version as a result.

While this journey towards revealing Gina’s true self is worth following, the conclusion brings a contradiction of emotions. The direction it goes is definitely the correct choice, but something is lacking. It’s not that Ellis leaves many questions unanswered with an open-ended plot either. It’s something else. Something deeper.

You begin to recall the stunning imagery used alongside the clunky, overlong sequences of overhead city shots and the repetition of the car crash at the center of everything. All those pieces start to feel like distractions from what’s going on. Filler to pad time before the final revelation—one which would have been the mid-way point in most other films as they continue towards the answers Ellis leaves to our imagination here.

This is one more reason why I wish The Broken was a short. If those moments that work were distilled down and compacted into a thirty-minute tale that ended on this chilling revelation—that would have been phenomenal. As it is now, the length allows us to figure out the ending too early to ruin the suspense. The cloud lifts from Gina too slowly, giving us time to lose interest and therefore not get hit as hard by the forthcoming blow. Rather then be stunned, we want more. We want a conclusion to justify the time we’ve spent.

I’m a big fan of Lena Headey, but I don’t think she’s given much to really do here. She’s playing a character in Gina that walks around in a fog—a semi-amnesiac trying to figure out what happened and why those around her seem menacingly different from the loved ones she remembers. I enjoyed both Asier Newman and Michelle Duncan as her brother and his girlfriend, both proving that name recognition wasn’t an important motive here (although Headey’s involvement surely helped secure financing). It’s Richard Jenkins who adds the most value, though. You see the grief and fatigue of a father raising two children in a foreign land for the past fifteen years after his wife passed away.

My real takeaway is the visuals as Sean Ellis puts his creative eye to good use. Unfortunately, with every stunning shot comes a clunky passage that could have been improved or excised since they lose the audience rather than draw them in. A few of the angles and compositions are truly wonderful, though, and some sequences disturb to great effect.

A moment when Melvil Poupaud’s Stefan’s face is altered into one of demonic darkness is memorable and a brief shot of the eerily lit “room” behind Duncan’s hallway mirror is atmospherically gorgeous. Part of me wishes we received more of these glimpses into the parallel dimension, but part of me likes that it avoiding it allows us to stick with Gina’s broken mind. That division really sums up my experience because the film has something special within. Sadly, there’s too much covering it up to prove a resounding success.