Thriller Fractured is one movie we should all be thankful for on Netflix. This is not the most outstanding film, extremely niche and not designed for the widest audience, so it simply would not have survived at the box office. But on the video service, I think it’s destined for a long life – it’s quite exciting, it has nerve and drama, and the final clue leaves a long aftertaste. That’s about the finale and I wanted to write – to compare the sensations with you, the readers. Have we seen everything correctly? And was it possible to calculate the key twist in advance?
So, “Fracture” tells us the story of a man named Ray, who, along with his wife Joanna and daughter Peri, makes a car crossing through the American outback. On the way, at one of the stops, the girl falls into the pit of a construction site and breaks her arm. At the nearest hospital, at first they do not want to examine the daughter for a long time, and then, together with her mother, they are sent to one of the lower floors in order to perform the necessary diagnostic procedures. After that, Ray is forgotten in a heavy dream, and when he wakes up, he finds out that everyone around believes that he arrived alone and that there were no wife and daughter with him. After a long search, Ray discovers Joanna and Peri in the basement of the hospital, where they are being prepared to harvest organs for “black transplants”, but at the same time, viewers see that the man is in a state of insanity,
So what happens at the end?
When Ray, believing that everyone around him is lying, breaks out of the hospital security room, a special psychiatrist is invited for him, who is designed to calm the man and get to the bottom of the problem. In a conversation with Ray, the “shrink man” finds out that eight years ago, a man experienced severe psychological trauma, having lost his pregnant wife in an accident. The doctor convinces Ray, the police, and his colleagues to visit the gas station where Pary had an accident, and everyone except the man comes to the conclusion that the man had a mental breakdown, killed his family, and only then came to the hospital delirious.
Ray, however, has a different view of what is happening. He believes that something vile is happening in the depths of the hospital, and having made his way into the basement, he discovers in it a laboratory for extracting organs from patients delivered to the hospital. Having interrupted the operation on his child, Ray takes away Joanna and Peri, but the audience sees that he took some unfortunate person under anesthesia.
As it is revealed in the final shots, Peri did not survive the fall at the gas station, hitting her head on the concrete, and then the man accidentally killed Joanna too, pushing her into the protruding rebar. The bodies of his wife and daughter all this time lay in the trunk of Ray’s car – so the psychiatrist was right, the man lost his mind from grief and built a new reality around himself, where his family was alive.
Key break point
Obviously, the episode with the fall of Peri becomes the key moment of “Fracture” – this is where reality gives way to a distorted point of view on what is happening. By the time of the accident, Ray was completely exhausted and broken, disputes with Joanna, his failures and problems had grown into a huge lump that could crush anyone. The death of his daughter launched an uncontrollable process, the first victim of which was his wife – Ray simply pushed Joanna away and she fell headlong onto a pin sticking out of the ground.
Further, reality is separated from what we see on the screen. In reality, Ray puts the bodies of his daughter and wife in the trunk of a car and drives to the hospital to treat the wound on his head. At the same time, the man himself believes that he is taking his daughter, who broke her arm after a fall, to the hospital. In the hospital, Ray faints, and upon regaining consciousness, he believes that reality is the story that he came up with after an accident and an unintentional murder. Moreover, the man is ardently confident in his version and considers the arguments of the surrounding doctors, security guards and policemen to be part of a sinister conspiracy.
Loss of reality leads to disaster
By the very end of history, we are watching how the loss of solid ground under our feet leads to more and more irrational actions. In his wild pursuit of his phantom wife and daughter, Ray steals weapons, forges documents, injures a doctor, and kills a police officer. What started as a tragic accident turns into a terrible chain of crimes with every new step.
And then the story finally makes sense. The protagonist of the film, faced with an unimaginable tragedy eight years ago, was broken and did not find a way to get rid of the pain. The only conclusion that he took out of that trouble is that henceforth he should be even more decisive and not bend under the outside world. This is how he behaves in new circumstances – he simply goes ahead, solving the task set by himself, even if it is far from reality. Ray’s story in “The Fracture” is a dramatic warning that no psychological trauma can be experienced alone, psychological help is needed to one degree or another, otherwise the subsequent fall can be even more terrible.
Movie hints
But back to the picture. Could clues be found to Ray’s true state and what really happened over the course of the story? From the height of what I have already seen, I definitely say “Yes”. There were more than enough hints, they just needed to be noticed and correctly interpreted.
For example, two moments of Ray’s shutdown. The hero falls into oblivion twice during the film – at the moment of falling and hitting his head and in the hospital, when he finally hands over his wife and daughter into the hands of doctors. As it turned out, this particular segment is a fictional reality, a sequence of fantasies in which a man brings his daughter to the hospital and, together with his wife, is waiting for a doctor’s appointment. Before the fall, everything is real, after waking up – when the hospital staff tries to explain to the man that he came alone – everything is real. Between these moments of oblivion is madness.
The clues are easy to read in how the staff behave in Ray’s “dream”. Nurses and doctors focus too much on the issue of organ donation, clearly going beyond the necessary consultations before treating a broken arm. For some reason, the girl is sent for a tomography, although her hand is only damaged, and she must be transported to the basement, although later we see that all the necessary tools and devices are on the first floor of the hospital. Then, clearly more than necessary, during this period of Ray’s communication with the administration, the tragedy that happened to the hero’s first wife is mentioned. All this indicates that what is shown is formed by the sick fantasy of a man.
Finally, the CCTV cameras installed in the hospital do not record the presence of a girl and a woman inside the hospital, who allegedly arrived with Ray. Moreover, the filmmakers carefully avoid shots in which the man would be with his family, on the contrary, we mostly see either him in close-up, or Joanna and Peri, sitting separately. This is not the most obvious artistic technique, but it is quite effective in this case.
Not everyone will be delighted with the plot twist that its authors came up with for “Fracture” – the story turned out to be too tragic and even scary. But there is a big plus in this courage to sacrifice a child’s intrigue – it’s hard to believe in a terrible outcome until the very end. And this is what touches the picture most of all – reality is always worse than fiction.
In “Fracture” Ray’s family is actually dead, almost at the very beginning of the film, he killed his wife and daughter
The key moment of the tragedy in The Fracture is the scene in which Ray follows his daughter into a construction pit. Joanna, the wife of the protagonist, comes running to the noise, and is horrified to see that her daughter has died, and a blood stain is spreading around her. Ray is shocked, he does not understand what happened. Joanna screams hysterically and hits him, he pushes his wife away and she falls on the protruding rebar. And he also dies.
After some time, Ray comes to his senses and sees what he did. The protagonist reaches the edge – and, it seems, goes crazy. He hides the bodies of his daughter and wife in the trunk of a car and convinces himself that they are alive. But Peri has a broken arm, so she needs urgent medical attention. At breakneck speed, he rushes to the nearest hospital. Meanwhile, his mind diligently draws a new – alternative and non-existent – reality.
Ray is unable to accept the terrible truth, and therefore invents a strange conspiracy theory, convinces himself of its reality and diligently looks for the slightest evidence. As it turns out at the end, non-existent.
Ray goes completely crazy at the end because he can’t deal with reality.
As the story approaches its denouement, Ray finds it increasingly difficult to keep his sanity and sinks deeper into insanity. The conspiracy acquires completely irrational features, and the imagination of the protagonist finally loses all connection with reality.
After the terrible tragedy that Ray experienced eight years ago, he simply cannot come to terms with the new one. That is why he frantically clings to the hope that his relatives are alive. As a result, at the very end of The Fracture, he is convinced that everything is in order with his wife and daughter, and completely withdraws into himself. Irrevocably.
