Fractured (2019)

Brad Anderson's Fractured arrives with the sober credentials of a mid-budget psychological thriller and the even soberer fate of a Netflix dump in October. Sam Worthington plays Ray, a man who loses his wife and daughter inside a hospital that claims never to have met them. The machinery is familiar: a head injury, a gas station pit, an unreliable narrator. The film runs this apparatus with competence and no conviction, and the final reveal, that his family died in the hole and have been in the back seat the whole time, lands with the soft thud of a joke whose punchline we guessed in the parking lot.

On the matter of social consciousness, the account is brief. Adjoa Andoh appears as a doctor, and a few non-white faces populate the waiting room, but the film offers them without comment, which is the correct and unremarkable way to cast an ensemble. Lily Rabe's Joanne spends the picture being lost, mourned, and finally revealed as a corpse; the screenplay finds no angle on her beyond that function. The organ-harvesting conspiracy waves vaguely at venal medicine. It is a stock device, the same one that has powered hospital thrillers since the Eisenhower administration, and it carries no structural argument about who profits. Ray's drinking and his head trauma are plot furniture, not an invitation to consider the mind's varieties. Nothing here lectures. The film wants to disorient us, not improve us.

The result is a thriller that aspires to nothing beyond its own twist and does not quite achieve even that. It is not preachy. It is not angry. It is a competently lit hallway with a surprise at the end of it, and the surprise is that a film could pass through the culture of its moment and pick up so little of it along the way. We score it accordingly, a low number honestly earned, with the small credit due to a cast that reflects the world without being asked to announce that it does. The sommelier tastes, pauses, and sets down the glass.