The Broken (2008)

If you like slow burn horror movies you may like this more than I did. When I saw it was a English movie I kind thought it would go like this. Hate to be the standard American but not much happens and the dialogue is kind of odd.

The description given for the movie was essentially A woman suspects she has a doppelganger and all her family and friends are in on it. This led me to believe it'd be a fun movie, horror or drama or sci-fi, either paranormal, mental illness, or some manner of aliens.instead, we get virtually nothing for the first half hour or so except lots of mirrors breaking for seemingly no reason. Then the protagonist Gina sees herself in a car driving down the street, and follows it into a flat. The way the film is shot, it's hard to follow events or characters, so I hadn't even realized she had done all this until later on when she described it all. Then at some point she gets into a car accident and starts having memory problems afterwards.there are a few jumpscare moments, usually involving the mirrors, which are completely out of place with the tone of the rest of the movie, while Gina seeing a therapist about her memory loss, where she suddenly divulges that she thinks her boyfriend Stephan has been replaced with an imposter. Just as I squeal Capgras syndrome, the therapist suggests it might be Capgras syndrome. Except nothing is done with this potential diagnosis as a plot point. She gets an MRI and told it's almost impossible to properly diagnose it, then we suddenly jump to some blonde woman I hadn't even realized until then was in the beginning of the film as part of the surprise party. 58 minutes it took to get to the actual core of the movie's plot as described in the brief summary. And 58 minutes in it sprung a big horror scene that had me laughing at how absurd it looked. The blonde woman is confronted by a doppelganger of herself which reaches into her face, sticking her arm into the woman's mouth and somehow killing her in that way. From there, we get a whole lot of moody scenes, shots of broken glass and broken mirrors, and constant repetitive flashbacks which don't make any sense until later in the film where, around 1 hour and 10 minutes in, it suddenly takes on an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" vibe, seeming to be going the route of that kind of adaptation before summarily giving it up.Then, we get the big reveal at the end that finally pieces together all the seemingly random scenes and flashbacks, after which the film seems to wan tot go back to its "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" vibe, but by now the movie's over and they've done next to nothing with the concept, new or rehashed. Ultimately it feels like the director didn't know what kind of movie to make, and kept trying out different styles and plot elements, never fully settling on one or the other, and ending up with this disconnect in tone slipping past the editing room and making this film.... not fully intact

A film with an interesting premise that never quite materializes, "Broken" presents a good cast of actors who are not allowed to realize their full talents. The opening quotation from Edgar Allen Poe remains an unfulfilled mystery. The shattered mirrors in various locations don't make sense. The heavy music designed to heighten our worry is overdone. Better to have left it away. There are elements of Hitchcock but they never come together to form a coherent story. Instead, we are led down various paths as the young woman protagonist tries to sort things out after being injured in an auto crash. And we are none the wiser for her attempts. The worst thing about the film as that it is boring and drags in places. The relationships between the different characters in the film are tenuous and often inexplicable. We are left to make assumptions about who they are and how they relate to one another. A waste of fine talent. In the end we are left holding the bag (of popcorn?) without a denouement that would help us understand what the author/director was driving at. In summary,"Broken" leaves us wondering what exactly the young woman experienced and whether she was able to overcome her apparent mental difficulties.At one point she undergoes a series of brain scans and when her doctors say these are inconclusive and she would need to submit to more tests, she refuses and leaves the hospital. So what? It's easy to assume that she's intimidated by a bunch of men in white smocks looking at scans of her brain, but there's got to be more to it. We cannot see the conclusions she draws from her experience. Instead, we are led on a wild goose chase. This is another film about women as victims. Very disappointing.

A series of strange incidents and visions has a woman believing that a psychotic stranger is invading her life, only to discover that something far more sinister is happening and she races to get it controlled before it harms her.This here turned out to be slightly better than expected but was still a pretty flawed effort. One of the main problems here is the fact that there's just no explanation for what's going on here. So much of what's going on in here is glossed over in the story, from the very identity of what the strange identical beings are to what they're doing and what started their initial appearance, this one here just doesn't provide any answers at all as to what's going on here, leaving this one very confusing. As well, there's nothing about why the beings are murderous, since that only comes about in the very later stages and the majority of the running time we're given no reason at all to think this was a horror effort with the way they interact with everyone, since this one doesn't present them as ravenous beings at all, or even what they are, so the first half of this is about these strange beings that aren't too threatening not doing much so this is just an utterly boring effort overall. It does pick up in the last half with some pretty suspenseful sequences, including two very good sequences in a bathroom that provides two different outcomes, some bloody murders and even a chilling sequence in a darkened attic with a flashlight that has some good points to this, but it's all too little too late to save this from it's other flaws.Rated R: Language, Violence, Brief Nudity and a shadowy sex scene.