Fractured

Brad Anderson works here as he did before. He shot Session 9 in 2001 inside the genuinely abandoned Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts, and explained the choice plainly: it kept everything in one location, and the job was mostly enhancing what was already there. Fractured uses a real abandoned Manitoba hospital on the same principle, with the unit in Winnipeg from November 2018 to January 2019 and the city standing in for the American heartland. The script is by Alan B. McElroy, whose first credit was Halloween 4, written in under eleven days ahead of a writers strike, and who also wrote Wrong Turn and Spawn. That lineage shows in the pacing: this is a genre machine advancing door by door, not a character study. The real decision is the last scene. The film does not hold its two explanations in balance to the end. It picks one, and the pick retroactively changes what the first act meant. Sam Worthington’s father is given no ally, and every member of the hospital staff reads as both reasonable and suspect. A good fit if you want the film to commit at the end and do not mind an explanation that reinterprets the first act. Not for anyone who wants the institutional denial itself to stay the source of the dread.