new release - ¦ ¦- THE BROKEN - ¦ ¦- 4/10

Published on: February 2nd, 2009

Wearing its influences pretty proudly on its chic, sleek sleeve, overwrought psychological-horror The Broken emerges as an awkward cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman's 1978 San Francisco-set version) and Basil Dearden's unfairly-neglected 1970 chiller The Man Who Haunted Himself. Oliver Hirschbiegel's disastrous, big-budget remake of Body Snatchers - simply entitled The Invasion - crashed and burned such spectacular effect in 2007 that one can understand why The Broken has sat in distribution limbo since premiering, to mostly respectful notices, at Sundance a full year ago. Or maybe the producers simply realised that they had a film which was too arty to appeal to most horror audiences, but insufficiently accomplished to impress arthouse patrons.
   It's a glossy, visually impressive affair that presents early 21st century London as a chilly, forbidding – but well-heeled – metropolis, whose denizens move through a faint but detectable social miasma of anomie and alienation. The central figure is Gina (Lena Headey), an X-ray technician who is unnerved by glimpses of what looks like her double, on the street and at work (not for nothing is the picture's epigraph a quotation from the Poe tale 'William Wilson'). After a traumatic car-crash, these visions are supplanted by terrifying flashbacks and hallucinations, mirrors, and Gina starts to suspect that her boyfriend (Melvil Popaud, who's clearly seen Anton Walbrook in Gaslight) may have been replaced by an exact look-alike. A sympathetic psychiatrist (second-billed Ulrich Thomsen, wasted in an extended cameo) diagnoses a possible mental problem – but Gina suspects that there may be a more supernatural explanation, perhaps connected with a recent spate of inexplicably exploding mirrors.
   There's material here for a fine, imaginative spine-tingler – and one certainly can't fault the cast: this is Headey's first big-screen lead since her belated breakthrough in 300; her father is played by Richard Jenkins, essaying the kind of expert supporting role which may, post-Oscar-nomination for The Visitor, will presumably no longer be his bread and butter. Though Gina is British, her dad is American – he even works in a fairly high-ranking job at the American Embassy, which enables writer/director Ellis to indulge himself with a nod towards The Omen. There's also a shower-murder that tips a wink to Psycho, not to mention the fundamentally derivative aspects of the script already mentioned.
   But such references can't help but show up the numerous deficiencies in Ellis's own work – including several gaping plot-holes, an unfortunate tendency towards repetition and slowness (major problems when the running-time is a brisk 88 minutes). Time after time a scene builds an atmosphere of dread-soaked, doomy intensity – only to fizzle out into nothing or, worse, dissipate via some cheap "boo!" style scare, ripped straight from the hack-director's bag of horror-movie tricks. There are some creepy concepts in The Broken, a film which does linger with surprising force in the mind for such an unsatisfactory enterprise. At certain junctures it recalls – or, as usual with Ellis, not-so-subtly quotes from – certain J-horror titles from the last decade, many of which have been picked up by "western" studios for remake. Perhaps, just for once, the flow might be reversed – some talented Japanese or Korean writer-director could well piece together something worthwhile and functional out of The Broken's clumsily-assembled fragments.

Neil Young, 3rd February, 2009

alternative orthography of title : The Brøken
director : Sean Ellis
country : UK (UK/Fr)
year : 2008
run-time : 88m (BBFC)

seen : 22nd February, 2009
cinema : CineWorld, Milton Keynes
format : 35mm
paid : n/a (press show – 60th CinemaDays event)

MVP : Angus Hudson (cinematographer)
respected second opinion : Justin Chang, Variety