After watching the Netflix film Fractured, you're probably going to second guess taking your family to any unknown hospital. A man takes his family to a hospital after his daughter suffers a fall. And once they've been checked in, seen, and the daughter taken off for tests, the man sits there and waits for a long time.
When he decides to get up and just check on the status, the hospital tells him they have zero record of his wife or his daughter ever being there. Is he losing his mind or is there something nefarious at play within the hospital? Sam Worthington plays the dad, Ray, and he is super convincing in this role. I mean, he is timid, he is nervous, and you just don't know if he's losing his mind or if he's actually picking up on a conspiracy that is going on within the hospital.
His reactions, his nervousness, his just his mannerisms, all of this just go to build the mystery of the show. In this, you see Ray hear and notice things just that are going on in the hospital, and it leads him to act in a certain way. And probably I would act the exact same way if I'm experiencing everything that he is.
But what I loved is that as a viewer, it's all misdirection. I don't know what is true anymore because I hear what Sam Worthington's Ray is saying, I see what he is seeing, I see what the doctors are seeing and saying, and all of this just there are tons and tons of contradictions. And I don't know what's true, and I don't know what's up from down, and I loved it.
It's not often that a movie keeps me guessing from beginning to end. I mean, I even paused this thing seven minutes in and just announced my prediction. This is going to happen.
This is what it is. All proud of myself because I had figured it out, hoping that I might be wrong because then I might would be disappointed, you know, seven minutes into an hour and a half film. They're like, oh, that's a lot of wasted time there because I've done that before and that's not fun.
And that just means the movie sucked. But in this, happy to say, I was wrong. And every single one of my predictions kept coming up wrong as we moved along.
And then at the point, I was just like, okay, I think this is what it is. But I could also think this. So I'm just full of doubt.
And I think that was the greatest part about this movie is that up until the very end, I kept guessing. Now, this film also does remind me a little bit of the movie Coma. It's based on a book by Robin Cook.
And it was, I think, Michael Douglas in the mid-70s or early 80s. And that's a medical thriller where just a hospital is not doing great things in order to get certain things from patients. And this had that feel to it. Although the medical part of this is barely there.
Fractured is more character-driven on Ray and his family and just all of his interactions within the hospital and everything he's seeing and experiencing and thinking and feeling. Honestly, I was frustrated by the character of Ray.
I didn't really like him all of the time. And I think some of that is because of the timidness or the nervousness or just that schizophrenic, like, I don't know what's really true, and I believe this, and I'm going after this. And so sometimes I wish that he would have acted in a different way. But that also endeared me to him.
It made me empathetic to him because I was like, all right, you know what? If I'm seeing the exact same things you're seeing, hearing the same things you're hearing, I'm probably going to go down this exact same path as you. And so I can't fault you for that, even though I don't necessarily like all of it. And I think some of it was just because I didn't want to act that way.
I wouldn't want to act that way or be that indecisive or maybe crazy or maybe right. That's the other thing, that if I'm right, it's terrifying. And if I'm crazy, well, that's also terrifying because what else am I, you know, just hallucinating? So I love that in the film, I get to question all of that.
All in all, Fractured is a really fun ride, and it kept my brain guessing from beginning to end which I appreciated. For me, 8.5 seems like the perfect rating go give to the movie. Though it was about six years ago when it came out, it's still a dope movie worth watching.
