Broken [DVD] [2008] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

I'll open with a warning: as fond as I am of "The Broken," I suspect few others will share my enthusiasm. Lots will like it, a few will hate it (particularly the ending), but it is so tailored towards my not always conventional horror movie ideals that few will admire it the way I do. Also, my nonexistent expectations probably colored my response a bit. (I've watched it twice now and enjoyed it no less the second time, but the initial impression can last even in later viewings.) So consider this a caveat for my readers, if any.

"The Broken" is perhaps the most praised entry in the years After Dark Film Festival set (faint praise, no doubt), and is a brief, extremely stylish and moody exercise in low-key horror. Make no mistake, those looking for visceral horror will be met with lengthy, near silent scenes where the disturbed protagonists wanders about the empty apartment, trying to understand her peculiar situation. (The moments of overt horror are effective, but rare, though perhaps too melodramatic for some tastes.) The tactics are drawn straight from the moody horror handbook: blue filter, rain, strangely empty streets, slow, creeping camera movements, rumbling music, ominously symbolic imagery (broken glass) etc. That said, the execution is remarkably adroit, and director Ellis maintains are air of uncertainty all throughout the film. (The performances are also solid, though not much is expected of them.) The film plays as something of a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers (doppelgangers, paranoia issues) and The Ring (the visuals, emphasis on mood), and manages to combine the two approaches so as to avoid redundancy. Many will still accuse it of being a rip-off of something or other, but that's usually a lazy, non-analytic criticism. Most genre pics just recycle the tropes--that's what they're supposed to do, for the most part.

The story is simple: one night a grown family living in London meet for a pleasant birthday dinner for the father, though one interrupted by the ominous shattering of a large mirror sitting opposite the dinner table. The daughter Gina (Lena Headey) soon finds her life has gone awry, as she, the next day, spots a mysterious, identical woman driving along the road. Gina follows her to an apartment containing apparent emblems from her life (a photo of her (?) and her father (?)) then drives off distraught, only to crash her jeep and land in the hospital. She cannot remember the details of her crash, though she is upset by the memory of her double, and comes to believe that the now strangely cold and distant Stephan is not her boyfriend. Even worse, the plague of doubles appears to spread throughout the city, as observed by other family members.

The story is, again, minimal, though it uses themes I particularly like, and I enjoy how it refuses to explain or contextualize itself excessively. It's like the best horror short stories, where we just slip through the real world and into an eerie variant where terrors lurk. (A mirror shatters, and suddenly nothing is the same anymore.) This is perhaps my favorite sort of horror, and no film I've seen in recent memory evokes it better than "The Broken." Some, however, will view it as all mood and no payoff, and that's a position I can respect, if not agree with. (Its being a scant 83 minutes, minus the credits, helps on this front.)

It is, however, impossible to fully consider "The Broken" w/o mentioning the ending. In short, I think it works, but I need to go into more detail, particularly to explain to those who've seen the film and didn't like it why I did appreciate it. Those who do not want the ending revealed should skip this paragraph. Last chance to move on . . . Okay, now that we've gotten rid of the others, here goes: It is finally revealed that who we believe is Gina through most of the pic is, in fact, her doppelganger. When Gina entered the apartment (her own apartment) the double kills her and drives off. She crashes, though, and loses her recent memories, along with having her personality temporarily altered by the bruising. This is a somewhat contrived conclusion, but I love one aspect: it refuses to sellout the premise of the movie. In films like these, it always turns out that the protagonist was delusional in some way, thus negating the supernatural. Ellis plays up this angle, leads us down the path and then inverts it: the main character is delusional, but in a way that reinforces the supernatural reality of the film, rather than subverting it. Thus, though a bit contrived, it works beautifully on a kind of metafictional level. Perhaps more to the point, the endings in these films are rarely inspired; the films should be about the mood generated by the mystery, not the solution. Those who are angered by it should remember this, and reflect on how hackneyed and obvious the revelatory endings to all the other mysterious horror pics they've seen were.

Anyway, this was a very pleasant surprise. Even those who disagree on the effectiveness of the ending should be able to appreciate the moody, paranoid ambience of the rest, provided they admire that kind of thing. Check it out.

Grade: A-

Before I watched THE BROKEN, I assumed it was going to be another one of those lame and pointless PG-13 teenage "Horror" stinkers filling the theaters these days. I'm talking about such lame and uninspired hack Horror movies like SKELETON KEY, THE PULSE (the "american interpretation" of the movie, for lack of a better phrase) WHITE NOISE (how the mighty have fallen Michael Keaton), BUTTERFLY EFFECT (can you believe there are three of those movies?) and other teeny bopper, luke warm affairs that pass for "scary" these days.

Boy, was I ever surprised that THE BROKEN was neither PG-13 or lame! It's a good 'ol fashioned mature R rated Horror thriller, just like they used to make in the good 'ol days! (God bless R rated Horror violence and an actual mature and thoughtful plot!) This movie isn't afraid of telling the story at it's own pace, keeping things dark (spooky) and just letting the over all feeling of the movie, creep the viewer out!

THE BROKEN is basically about this woman who happens to see her double driving down the street (in a car much like her own) one day. This of course leads to a series of interesting events, with the main character eventually running into herself. It would seem that a lot of people's doubles have been smashing their way through mirrors and killing their real sides.

I guess the only question to beg is, at that point, which side is the "real" side? From a psychological stand point (and as a reviewer), these questions come up during the movie no matter what. It's just commen sense and reasonable questions. Just because we've gotten to know her (the main character) and understand her situation, doesn't mean her otherside is the "bad" side.

Except for in this case, it does! Mainly because these doubles kill you, soon as they exit the mirror, dump your body and then take over your life! It's a strange plot, not to mention the idea of dopplegangers is a rather odd one within itself.

The movie has a very Ridley Scott, David Lynch feel. Maybe a little Eli Roth too, minus the humor. I kept getting creeped out and it reminded me of such films as THE EXORCIST III and A TALE OF TWO SISTERS. Everything has a very dark and quiet feeling to it. Each scene passes the other with such a spooky and eerie vibe that you (the viewer) start to look around nervously, like your own double will be standing there in the corner of your room! Talk about seeing yourself for who you really are! HA! Sorry for the bad joke.

Anyways, the ending of the movie isn't really shocking or revolutionary. The over all film is rather straight forward and it doesn't try to pull any unexpected punches, which is a good thing in this case. Everything seems to flesh out nicely. The point of the movie is to just creep you out and in that respect, it works.

Normally I don't comment on the actual quality of the DVD's audio but in this case, I feel the need to do so. For some strange reason, the audio on the DVD is all messed up! It's really quiet during some moments and then in others, crushingly loud! What gives!?! Whoever did the mixing on this movie needs to have their head checked! Hopefully not all the third series AFTER DARK HORRORFEST movies are mixed this way. Talk about annoying!

On the movie itself, well done! Gore wise, nothing to really see here fellow Gore Hounds. One scene has a woman's double sneaking up on her in the shower, PSYCHO style, and shoving her entire arm into her mouth! All the way down her throat! Bloody but not really gory. This one is more about the strange scenes, creepy doubles and spooky atmosphere.

Give the movie a shot. Don't watch it alone and don't watch it at night!

Very creepy indeed!

Watching "The Broken" is like playing an endless game of Clue without ever finding out who killed Mr. Boddy. It's a mystery without a solution, a tense psychological drama that reveals nothing other than how tense and psychological it is. It plays mind games only with itself, leaving the audience to watch from the sidelines in a bored, confused stupor. The idea behind it is intriguing, and for a time, it successfully builds itself up. The thing is, the act of building is pointless if there's no height requirement. At a certain point, it becomes painfully clear that the story will only keep building without ever reaching anything. I do give it credit for creating the right atmosphere; the characters inhabit a moody, subdued world where nothing seems safe, not even a person's own home. But atmosphere can only go so far, even in a horror film. It also needs an understandable story with an ending that doesn't leave us with more questions than answers.

It doesn't help that "The Broken" is unbearably slow, and this is despite the relatively short running time of eighty-eight minutes. Specific shots are dragged out so long that I eventually stopped waiting for something shocking to happen. It works only the first few times, at which point I kept in mind that suspense is most effective when things go slowly. After those few times pass, however, the film comes dangerously close to being boring, moments of horror and all. This is probably because it does a fine job showing us what happens, but it does a terrible job explaining why or how it's happening. By the end of the film, I was unable to make heads or tails of what I had just seen. What a shame, especially since it opens on such a promising note.

The film begins by quoting the final lines of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "William Wilson": "You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead--dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist--and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." The story, you see, explores the theme of the doppelganger, or the double, where the self is divided amongst two separate yet identical bodies. In Poe's story, another William Wilson--who looks similar and shares the same birthday--continuously haunts the protagonist to the point of insanity. The same theme exists in "The Broken," which tells the story of Gina McVey (Lena Headey), a British radiologist who, after seeing a clone of herself, gets into a serious car accident. As she recovers, she begins to fear that things aren't quite right, that her French boyfriend, Stephan (Melvil Poupaud), isn't the person he once was.

From here, the story takes a long-winded journey through strange territory, where mirrors constantly shatter and fragmented bits of memory keep flashing on the screen. Gina keeps trying to make sense of the crash, and apparently, so is writer/director Sean Ellis, who constantly shows it in slow-motion replays from various angles. He also relies greatly on composer Guy Farley, whose score is almost entirely made up of dissonant crescendos. It creates a mood, but what good is mood without context? Scary things keep happening, yet there's no explanation for any of it, which tells me one of two things: Either this movie is an experimental art piece that intentionally challenges rational thought, or Ellis was so taken by the psychological themes that he neglected to focus on an actual plot. It's difficult to believe that it's the former, given the fact that Gina is not the only character with a doppelganger problem. Her American father (Richard Jenkins), her brother (Asier Newman), and her brother's wife (Michelle Duncan) are all affected in some way, probably because of a scene early in the film--when the entire family eats dinner at the father's house, a large mirror in the dining room suddenly falls over and shatters.

For the sake of argument, let us say that "The Broken" is intended to challenge rational thought. Are we to assume, then, that the plot itself is irrelevant, that we're only supposed to follow the psychological implications? If that's the case, then there's no better example of it than a plot twist near the end of the film, which, if you choose to interpret it metaphorically, effectively raises questions about which side of a mirror represents the reflection.

But again, the fact that more than one character has a doppelganger makes the idea difficult to accept. How could such a broad psychological concept apply to so many people? Maybe this film would have worked had it focused entirely on Gina, because at least then the mystery would be much less open to interpretation. There would be some sense that the story is actually reaching for something. When you have multiple characters with evil doubles of themselves, the symbolic ideas are bound to get hopelessly confused with one another. Such is the problem with "The Broken," a film that puts too many characters into a needlessly enigmatic story. I have no doubt that Ellis is trying to get at something, but for the life of me, I haven't a clue what it is. The only thing I got out of it, aside from the atmosphere, was a desire to reread the works of Edgar Allen Poe. So maybe seeing this film wasn't such a bad idea after all.