Intense, R-Rated Netflix Thriller Gaslights You Into Submission

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 hour ago

Whenever a psychological thriller starts with somebody sustaining a head injury, it’s either going to insult your intelligence or actually offer a great series of twists and turns. 2019’s Fractured occupies both lanes in the sense that you know you’re witnessing a very unreliable protagonist and that everything isn’t exactly what it seems. You don’t know what or who to believe because head injuries clearly have a negative impact on cognitive function, but also because people are acting weird and suspicious despite this. Or maybe you’re witnessing some combination of both; our protagonist is unreliable after getting severely concussed, but what he’s seeing could actually be real.

If you watch a disproportionate amount of psychological thrillers, you’ll probably clock what’s happening early on in Fractured, in the sense that you know there’s going to be a twist that blows the story wide open. As an avid fan of the genre myself, I went into this film expecting the usual beats and reveals, but was pleasantly surprised with where the narrative took me. By the end, the film lands in a safe, predictable place, but it successfully misdirects you multiple times on its way to an otherwise lackluster finale.

This’ll Certainly Get The Noggin Joggin’! 

Fractured’s setup introduces us to our protagonist Ray (Sam Worthington), his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe), and their daughter Peri (Lucy Capri). Ray and Joanne argue about their marriage on the way back from a Thanksgiving holiday at her parents’ place, and the drive is tense. They stop at a gas station to regroup, and that’s when all hell breaks loose. While cleaning up a spill in the back seat, Ray doesn’t notice that Peri wanders off to a construction site, where a vicious dog is ready to pounce on her. Once aware, Ray throws a rock at the dog to get it away from Peri, who’s standing at the edge of an exposed foundation pit. As Peri falls into the pit, Ray tries to save her but ends up falling himself.

When he regains consciousness, Ray learns that Peri is seriously injured, while Joanne, rightfully in a state of panic, pleads for him to do something. Clearly disoriented from the fall, and not to mention that he secretly picked up a couple of nips of brown liquor inside the gas station, Ray loads his family up in the car and hightails it to the hospital.

The hospital itself is the stuff of nightmares, but honestly not too far off from reality. After the excruciatingly long process of checking insurance and taking down information, Dr. Berthram (Stephen Tobolowsky) is finally able to see Peri, whose arm is fractured. Due to the nature of the fall, it’s advised that she get a CT scan to rule out any internal injuries. Ray falls asleep in the waiting room while Peri and Joanne are whisked away to the lower level. When Ray wakes up hours later, he’s horrified to find out that there’s no record of his family checking into the hospital with him.

Ray runs through the hospital trying to prove that his family is being held captive somewhere. Nobody believes him, meaning one of two things: he’s either hallucinating what happened to a degree, or the staff is gaslighting him so they can perform experiments on his wife and daughter. He speaks to the hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Jacobs (Adjoa Andoh), who tells him that he’s making things up, but when he breaks out and flags down two police officers, they’re willing to hear him out because his case is compelling enough for them to take him seriously.

As the investigation spirals, Ray becomes increasingly disoriented, but remains hellbent on uncovering the truth about this hospital. The problem is that he’s almost certain they’re trying to harvest his wife and daughter’s organs, and he’s racing against the clock to prevent that from happening.

The Ride Is Better Than The Destination

Like most psychological thrillers that appear exclusively on Netflix, Fractured is pretty standard fare. You’ve got the unreliable protagonist with a head injury and past substance abuse issues that make him patently unreliable. I knew right off the bat that what he’s experiencing isn’t necessarily the reality he’s living in. I’m not going to spoil the ending, but here’s an early first-act indicator that will tell you exactly what kind of experience you’re going to have with this movie.

After Ray and Peri fall into a pit and get seriously injured, he’s still the one who drives the car at breakneck speeds to the hospital. Joanne isn’t some damsel in distress and doesn’t say a thing about not being able to drive, yet Ray gets behind the wheel. In my mind, this is a sign that anything that happens post-accident is at least partially a figment of Ray’s imagination, because who in their right mind would let a man who just fell 20 feet onto a concrete slab drive a car?

Still, this minor yet significant plot point allows Fractured to have a lot of fun subverting audience expectations. By the time I got to the second act, I didn’t know what was up or down, and I’m normally pretty good at clocking these things. Every five minutes, I’d go from “these hospital folk are up to no good” to thinking, “Ray is out of his f****** mind, and this is all in his head.”

While it’s not one of the more memorable psychological thrillers I’ve seen, Fractured takes all of the usual tropes and flips them just enough to make it a worthwhile viewing experience. Every action and reaction, like who’s actually driving to the hospital, can be interpreted in more than one way, making you truly wonder what’s real and what’s not. The question is whether the film’s payoff is worth all the buildup, but that’s for you to decide.

Fractured is streaming on Netflix.