Fractured is a 2019 Netflix psychological thriller directed by Brad Anderson, the man behind The Machinist, written by Alan B. McElroy, and starring Sam Worthington as Ray Monroe. I'll be upfront, because there's no point being coy: I've been on a bit of a losing streak with movies lately, to the point where I genuinely started to wonder if the fault was mine. Maybe I'd forgotten how to enjoy anything. Then I watched this, and it kindly reassured me that no, the problem is very much the films, and this one in particular.

The premise, kept brief, is the setup for a far better movie than the one we got. On the way home from a tense Thanksgiving, Ray's family stops at a rest stop, his young daughter Peri takes a bad fall, and they rush her to a nearby hospital. Then his wife and daughter vanish, and the staff insist they were never admitted. The hook is solid. The execution is where it all falls apart.

Let's start with the lead, since the film leans on him almost entirely. For my money, Sam Worthington is a bad actor, and Fractured is a feature-length exhibit for the prosecution. The clearest tell is his American accent, which repeatedly slips back into his natural broad Australian, as if Ray himself isn't quite sure which country he was raised in. There's also a moment late on where he sings a gentle little song to his daughter, and it is delivered so flatly and so joylessly that I came away half-convinced his character secretly resented the kid. No warm, loving parent sings that badly by accident.

To the film's limited credit, it does pull off one trick for a while. For a solid fifteen minutes, it had me genuinely suspicious of the hospital staff, convinced they were up to something sinister. The problem is that this is a deliberate misdirection, and once you clock that you're being gaslit and that the truly unstable presence in the story is Ray himself, the whole thing deflates.

Then there's the twist, which the movie clearly believes is a knockout blow. Ray's wife and daughter have been dead since that fall at the rest stop, their bodies stashed in the boot of his car, and the entire hospital conspiracy is a delusion his guilt-ravaged mind constructed to avoid the truth that he's responsible. It's meant to floor you. It floored nobody. I had it pegged from the second he shoved his wife to the ground in the aftermath of the accident. A twist this heavily signposted isn't a twist, it's an appointment you're early for. The film even plants a "Get Well Soon" balloon at the construction site, in case the foreshadowing wasn't blunt enough already.